Urban Conflict Research Articles

Geschlechter und Zünfte, prinçipales und común. Städtische Konflikte in Kastilien und dem spätmittelalterlichen Reich

<bold><italic>Geschlechter </italic> and <italic>Zünfte</italic>, <italic>prinçipales </italic>and <italic>común.</italic> Urban Conflicts in Late Medieval Castile and the German Empire</bold> Late medieval urban conflicts in Castile and Germany lend themselves to fruitful comparisons. Despite the different social structures, non-privileged townspeople (<italic>común</italic>, <italic>meinheit</italic>) aspired to political participation and representation in both countries. This emergence of civic consciousness was due to rather well educated and economically successful members of the upper middle classes. In times of struggle or civil war or in situations of doubleelectionsof the king in the Medieval Empire, they were important partners of the monarchy. In the towns of Northern Atlantic Spain, their pragmatic alliances with the new dynasty of Trastámara, particularly the Catholic Kings, served mutual interests. It was directed against the influence of strong noble lineages and resulted in successful petitions and municipal reforms. German and Castilian terminology of communities and corporations (<italic>gemeinde, meynheit, Bruderschaft, común, comunidat, cofradía</italic>) is very similar. The ideal of common good (<italic>bien público de la república, gemeiner Nutz</italic>) was the paramount argument put forth within the urban political discourse. Inside the socially stratified late medieval system, German and Castilian craft guilds stressed the ideas of equality, justice and equity. Quoting privileges, good old customs, honour, famous ancestors and traditions, hereditary oligarchies and noble urban lineages referred to different values. Germany and Castile developed a very vivid life of leagues, associations and fraternities. In fear of conspiracies, the kings often tried to prohibit them. Designed to calm factional conflicts, electoral procedures such as the <italic>insaculación</italic> and other forms of lottery offer interesting insights into methods of conflict resolution. In times of intra-urban conflicts, the rulers’ reactions composed a large range of different measures, which included mediation, arbitrage, legislation, or, as in the case of the Comuneros or the Bauernkrieg, military repression. Finally, in the long run, town government and effective political participation stayed restricted to small groups.

Knowledge transfer on urban violence: from Brazil to Haiti

Increasingly, urban violence is a problem in the world, and traditional development models are sometimes inappropriate to rapidly changing urban contexts where the sense of ownership and appropriation of common space is key to effective programming. Faced with the relevance of the traditional North–South model, the growing importance of South–South Cooperation (SSC) as a form of development cooperation generates positive ways forward in overcoming the limitations of the existing model. This paper outlines the experience of Viva Rio, a Brazilian NGO that works through a community participatory framework that is unique in style and Brazilian in origin. Viva Rio has addressed urban conflict in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, by drawing on principles and techniques developed in Rio de Janeiro and strategically applying them to the Haitian context. The paper describes this experience and develops it into a framework of knowledge transfer. It describes Viva Rio’s modalities and how it has been productive because of its ability to adapt to on-the-ground realities.

Pandillas y conflicto urbano en Colombia

Las pandillas proliferan en todo el mundo. Su forma de habitar la localidad, a través del ejercicio de una cruda transgresión violenta, las ha puesto en el centro de la preocupación sobre la seguridad en la ciudad. La pandilla acude a la criminalidad y administra la violencia, no cabe duda. No obstante, la mirada y la tramitación del conflicto urbano no pueden desconocer a los otros actores partícipes de las guerras de pavimento: los vecinos organizados en defensas urbanas, las operaciones de limpieza, los actores armados, la delincuencia y hasta la policía. Esta otra cara, donde queda comprometido el fundamento mismo de la institucionalidad, suele ser olvidada. Mediante la mirada a tres ciudades colombianas, el artículo aborda entonces el papel y las formas de operación de dos de estos otros actores de la conflictividad urbana: los vecinos y las operaciones de limpieza.

Sing, Dance, and Be Merry: The Key to Successful Urban Development?

This study examines a unique case of urban redevelopment conflict in Seoul, South Korea. The Duriban case is one of the few urban redevelopment cases in South Korea that was peacefully resolved with protection of tenants' rights. The research aimed to answer why this case was peacefully resolved while other redevelopment cases have been contentious and even violent. Through documentary analysis and in-depth interviews with key actors, we identified the following eight categories as important factors: emotional support; sympathy; loose networks or bonds; continued action and volunteerism; place of interaction and bonding; encouragement and motivation for participation; transformation of physical space into a psychological space; and creating a meaningful and symbolic space. The findings highlight how community building through arts and cultural activities can be an important tool for socially just urban redevelopment.

Migration and Urban Transformations: Frankfurt in the 1960s and 1970s

This article investigates the intersections of urban transformations and migration in the 1960s and 1970s, in the case of Frankfurt am Main. The socio-political and spatial transformations of the city, which began in the course of the guest worker regime, will be examined through exploring the housing situation and the settlement pattern in the urban space. In order to do this, the practices and effects of the gradual long-term settlement of working migrants and the subsequent influx of their families will be presented in relation to the formation of urban foreigner and social policies as well as local migration debates. An examination of the chosen time period will enable a discussion of the meaning of urban conflicts about migration for the negotiation of the national immigration question, which took place from the 1960s and 1970s in the context of an effective immigration reality in the cities on the one hand, and the federal guidelines of a non-immigration country, on the other.

Intersecting Religioscapes and Antagonistic Tolerance: Trajectories of Competition and Sharing of Religious Spaces in the Balkans

This article analyses patterns of competition between religious groups in urban settings, and empirical indicators of the dominance of one religious community over another, utilising the theoretical model of ‘Antagonistic Tolerance’, or competitive sharing of space. The key analytical concept used is ‘religioscapes’: the distribution in spaces through time of the physical manifestations of specific religious traditions and of the populations that build them. These indicators include perceptibility (for example, height, mass, colour, audibility) and centrality in a settlement. The model is explained with reference to patterns of change of religioscapes in: Sarajevo, Bosnia; Sofia, Bulgaria; Belgrade, Serbia; and other examples from the post-Ottoman world. While the focus of the paper is mainly on cities, an analysis of specific sites in contemporary Cyprus reminds us that urban conflicts are inevitably tied to those in wider social spheres.

Three narratives in search of a city

This paper highlights the role of narratives in expressing, shaping and ordering urban life, and as tools for analysing urban conflicts. The paper distinguishes analytically between two prominent epistemological meta-narratives in contemporary urban studies and multiple ontological narratives in a given city—in this case Belfast. The first meta-narrative represents cities as sites of deepening coercion, violence and inequality and the second sees them as engines of new forms of transnational capitalism. Both are marked by the strategy of specifying ‘exemplar’ or ‘paradigm’ cities. The core of the paper addresses how these two meta-narratives map onto and interact with, three contemporary ontological narratives of urban regeneration in Belfast. We conceive of narratives—epistemological and ontological—as analytical tools and objects of analysis but also as tools for social action for competing political and economic interests and coalitions. While in the urban studies literature Belfast is typically studied as an exemplar ‘conflict city’, it is now being promoted as a ‘new capitalist city’. In the context of post-Agreement Belfast, we explore not only the ‘pull’ of exemplar narratives but also resistances to them that are linked to multiple and hybrid senses of place in the city. We conclude that any significant move beyond the exigencies of rampant commodification or recurring inter-communal antagonism must firstly, encourage new forms of grassroots place-making and, secondly, reform of Belfast's (and Northern Ireland's) fragmented governance structures.

Media territories and urban conflict

This article deals with the media-related practices enacted by social actors during urban conflict. Its theoretical objective is to stress the need for audience studies to focus on social actors’ concrete practices and, consequently, to switch from essentialist notions of ‘audiences’ to ‘audiencing’ as a practice. This makes it necessary to build theoretical and methodological bridges between audience and urban studies. Focusing on a conflict between Chinese migrants and Italian residents in an area of Milan, the article employs the concept of ‘media territories’ to account for the heterogeneous assemblages of media platforms, contents and devices mobilised by social actors to make sense of the conflict and to impose their own representations of the self, of competitors and of urban space. Within these assemblages, audiencing forms an important ‘secondary’ activity, whose sense can be understood only in relation to the other practices involved. The exploration of these assemblages is necessary for coming to grips with social actors’ conflictual media practices, and to understand the dynamics of urban conflict in media-saturated contexts.

Conflitti urbani ed empowerment dei migranti e dei poveri urbani: i rom jugoslavi di Tours e gli abitanti dei quartieri non regolamentari di Dakar e Tunisi

What is the contribution of urban conflicts to the migrants and poor city dwellers empowerment? The paper is based on the observation of three contentious situations - fighting against the eviction of a little slum settled by Roma migrants from the Ex-Yougoslavia in Tours (France), complaining for land facilities and other collective goods in the informal areas of Dakar and Tunis. Urban conflicts mainly contribute to social regulation. Nevertheless, by incitating the public authorities to provide facilities (Dakar, Tunis) or temporary hosting systems (Tours) these mobilizations produced positive effects on capacity building and political participation of migrants and poor city dwellers. These resources, which have a strong spatial dimension, can be converted to symbolical capital. In addition to that, the land facilities can reinforce the economical capital of the deprived populations (or, better, of a part of them).

L'articolazione tra dinamiche conflittuali, coinvolgimento politico e riconoscimento dei migranti. Uno studio di caso nella Terza Italia

Italian scholars have demonstrated growing interest in immigrants' political engagement. Most studies have focused on associationism and conventional forms of political participation, while little research has investigated their unconventional involvement. Additionally, in the context of urban conflicts, they have been assumed as passive political actors, or at least this can be deduced from the scarce attention dedicated to them. The paper aims to question this interpretation, while at the same time contributing to research on immigrants' unconventional engagement, through an examination of two conflicts that exploded in north-eastern Italy. In particular, the following questions will be addressed: what shapes can immigrants' political engagement take? How does it articulate with contentious dynamics? Can any form of recognition emerge from it? In order to answer these questions, evi- dence will be drawn from a research carried out in the cities of Modena and Verona, between 2008 and 2010. The analysis will build on the theoretical perspective by Dancygier (2010) to then criticise its scarce dynamicity with respect to a pragmatic approach. Contentious dynamics will be inspected alongside their articulation with immigrants' political engagement. This will provide empirical material to test the key hypothesis by Dancygier, according to whom it is power which mainly contributes to the emergence of native-immigrants conflicts, and the lack of it which anticipates the emergence of immigrants-state actors conflicts. The analysis will then be taken further to explore the type of ‘recognition' (Fraser and Honneth 2007) that can derive from urban conflicts.

Subversive Mobilities

The article approaches mobility through a cultural history of urban conflict. Using a case of “The Copenhagen Trouble,“ a series of riots in the Danish capital around 1900, a space of subversive mobilities is delineated. These turn-of-the-century riots points to a new pattern of mobile gathering, the swarm; to a new aspect of public action, the staging; and to new ways of configuring public space. These different components indicate an urban assemblage of subversion, and a new characterization of the “throwntogetherness“ of the modern public.

“The Cassette Played Poptones”

The embrace of the city in ruins was a familiar rallying cry of punk music. From Public Image Limited’s evocation of an urban subject murdered in the countryside while “the cassette played poptones,” to the Clash’s raucous calls for “a riot of our own,” to dub-influenced declarations of provincial alienation, to anthemic satires of Cold War apocalypse, to voyeuristic detachment in the face of urban decay, to critiques of inner-city racism, the punks’ city was both a scene of violence and of potential safety. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the anarchic growl of punk music confronted sectarian violence, unemployment, and a militarized state of emergency. Punk bands like the Undertones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Gang of Four, Public Image Limited, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, and the Fall pitched punk negation and artlessness against the sounds of urban conflict with unpredictable results. This essay argues that pop evanescence emerged as often as punk dissonance. The bands also intervened and vamped it up in the performance spaces of the music industry, including the television shows Top of the Pops and American Bandstand, playing off the alienating restrictions of lip-synching, miming, and media censorship, to full effect. Was this selling out to pop? Or, as this essay argues, did punk bands learn from pop even as pop sought to plunder and profit from punk, playing out, in the process, the internal contradictions of a punk culture confronting the struggles of urban life?

Opening Ceremonies and Closing Narratives: The Embrace of Media and the Olympics

Reflecting on media and the Olympics always involves much more than the technical quality of the coverage and the means of accessing it. There is now a considerable literature on the Olympics and Olympic media that engages with the enduring questions of socio-cultural power and politics, including social class, commercialization, indigeneity, ‘race’, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, urban conflict, citizenship, the state and national identity. Each successive Olympiad elicits additions to this literature that address both the general questions that historically apply to all Games, and the specific context of each host city and nation. This special issue of JOMEC Journal engages in a range of ways with the cultural politics of the mediated Olympics, focusing on the recent London 2012 Games that took place in the same country as the journal is located, and also raising issues that resonate with past and future Games in this and other places As such, it contributes in its own way to the contested cluster of outcomes that preoccupies Olympic discourse from the moment that cities determine whether to launch bids to host the Games – the Olympic legacy.

Urban Conflicts and Immigrants’ Engagement. A Comparative Pragmatic Analysis of Two Northern Italian Cities

At the beginning of the 1990s, urban safety entered political and media debates in Italy. Since then, an anti-social behaviour discourse has diverted attention towards newcomers who have repeatedly appeared as the main cause of urban safety conflicts. Italian scholars have often described these actors as the passive target of safety policies. The main aim of this paper is to demonstrate that in fact some residents of immigrant origins have engaged in the game of urban conflicts. A comparative analysis will be carried out to discuss contentious dynamics in two Italian cities, by building on ethnographical data collected between 2009 and 2010. The two cities which are the object of the analysis are Verona and Modena. They are situated in the so-called Third Italy, in the north of the country, and are characterised by diverging political subcultures. A consistent part of studies on immigrants’ collective action has drawn from the structural perspective and has insisted on political opportunities as a crucial explanatory variable. This contribution will show the added value of complementing this interpretation with a pragmatic sensitive one. Residents of immigrant origins will be observed while undertaking their thorny path of engagement characterised by the capacity to adapt, construct more or less lasting agreements with institutional and non-institutional actors and propose alternative solutions to influence a given context. Ultimately, this will also provide an example of how a pragmatic sensitive stance can help study politics in a continuum with policies, a preoccupation which lies at the core of urban theory.

Debating contemporary urban conflicts: A survey of selected scholars

This survey presents the results of a questionnaire sent to a list of key scholars and professionals in fields related to urban processes and planning – town planning, geography, sociology, architecture and anthropology. The survey raised four simple, straightforward questions. What are the most pressing conflicts with regard to contemporary cities? What are the main fields of action for solving them? How can your discipline contribute with respect to this task? Could you mention an intervention that could serve as an example of that line of work? The response represents a plural and multidisciplinary perspective on contemporary urban issues from which a series of research and intervention perspectives emerges.

"When the Sun Goes Down": The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Jean Toomer's Cane

Darwin Turner once wrote of Jean Toomer's literary masterpiece, Cane, that inspires critical rhapsodies rather than (In Minor Chord 207). Turner's observation is suggestive of the critical challenges that Cane poses. While there is no consensus regarding Cane's formal structure, critics have often described it in thematic terms as pastoral work. Bernard Bell's reading of Cane as a pastoral work, contrasting the values of uninhibited, unlettered Black rustics with those of the educated, class consciousness Black bourgeoisie, privileges the lyrical elements of the novel and its indebtedness to Afro American tradition of music as major structural device (Portrait of an Artist 13). Yet his analysis here only extends to the poetic pieces that intersperse Cane without comparing them to the prose narratives that provide thematic and structural counter-point to them. Lucinda MacKethan also offers reading of the novel as pastoral narrative, arguing that Toomer mold[ed] [Cane] into version of Southern pastoral perceived with the black man's double of deep belonging and forced alienation (A Pastoral Problem 425). MacKethan's description of Toomer's ironic pastoral vision in Cane does not adequately attend to the rural and urban conflict that frames the novel's portrayal of culturally displaced blacks in the North. In this essay, I will argue that Cane is best understood as what Michael Denning has described as ghetto variant of the complex pastoral form that emphasizes the unique racial and ethnic conflicts associated with stories of deracinated (im)migrant peoples. Thus, my reading of the novel as ghetto pastoral examines the racial and cultural tensions that necessarily shape Toomer's aesthetic in the novel. In The Cultural Front, Denning calls the ghetto pastoral as yoking of naturalism and the pastoral, stories that dialectically represent urban experience as an allegorical cityscape composed in pidgin of American slang and ghetto dialect, with traces of old country tongues (231). According to Denning, these stories sought to provide more accurate portrayal of ethnic class experience. In contrast to traditional pastoral narratives, which privileged transcendent pastoral ideal in response to the alienating aspects of modern society, the ghetto pastoral narrative revealed the ways in which ethnic and racial categories the experience of class immigrants in the city. These are stories about how displaced immigrants in the city attempt to reimagine themselves in relation to pastoral landscape back home, but they are also stories about how race and ethnicity complicate that transformative ideal. As Denning writes, Ethnicity and race had become the modality through which class peoples experienced their lives and mapped their communities (239). Denning offers as examples of the ghetto pastoral mode the work of authors such as Mike Gold, Claude McKay and Anzia Yezierska, novelists whose works arose out of the proletarian moment of the 1920s and 1930s. As Denning points out, ghetto pastoral novels such as McKay's Home to Harlem and Mike Gold's Jews Without Money revealed the ways in which race and ethnicity challenged the transcendent ideal of green landscape that was at the core of conventional pastoral narratives. Instead, these ghetto pastoral narratives portrayed contested urban landscape composed of the old and the new, past and present--at once bringing together the symbolic elements of ethnic folk culture and the harsh material realities of urban life. Rather than the boundless potential expressed in traditional pastoral narratives, ghetto pastorals were stories that revealed how racial and ethnic boundaries delimited the lives of displaced (im)migrants. At the same time, these stories expressed the ways in which migrants pushed on these boundaries to create liminal spaces of existence, spaces formed at the interstices between the pastoral dream of transcendence and the urban realities of working class tenements, sweatshop and factory labor, and cheap mass entertainments (239). …

Beyond Glory: Civilians, Combatants, and Society During the Battle of Shanghai

The 1932 Sino-Japanese conflict in Shanghai was the first example of a modern war waged in a large city between two heavily equipped armies. It was also the first urban conflict during which massive destruction, especially aerial bombing, ensued with utmost disregard for the consequences to civilians. This paper looks at the damage and losses the two contending armies suffered. The group of Chinese armies involved in the conflict was not prepared either to handle the consequences of using highly lethal weapons or to provide the appropriate level of medical assistance to their soldiers involved. The result was a catastrophic level of casualties. The battle for Shanghai announced the frightening massive waves of destruction that World War II would unleash on European and Japanese cities.

Reflections on Situating Taiwan in Modern Chinese Cultural Studies

Overshadowed by its massive cousin just to the west, the island and civilization of Taiwan is easily overlooked but has long been a bastion of great intellectual activity on all disciplinary fronts. Many of us in Chinese studies visit Taiwan regularly, use its resources, mingle with Taiwan-based academics, present our research there, and take time to enjoy what it offers in cuisine, art, music, and natural beauty. A much smaller number of us focus our research on Taiwan itself, and the way that research is carried out is fraught with the problems of a contested epistemological geography. Some center their research solely on Taiwan. Others take a comparative approach. In my opinion, both of these ways of organizing and presenting ones findings are acceptable, and the litmus test for judging research on Taiwan should be the intrinsic quality of that work and not based upon whether one is a “pure” Taiwan studies scholar or not. All this stems from Taiwan's continued ambiguous and indeterminate status in the world politically and ethnically. This problem will not go away soon, but that does not mean we should shrink from it. The motivation for writing this short piece came from my reading of Emily Baum's (2011) review of Yomi Braester's new book Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Conflict (2010).

Urban governance, sustainability and environmental movements: post-democracy in French and British cities

Drawing on an empirical study of environmental policies in Manchester (UK) and Saint-Etienne (France), this article attempts to provide a periodization of the evolution of the management of urban environmental issues. The periodization traces the shift in discourse from a focus on ‘local environment’ to ‘sustainable urban development’. Three main sequences are identified corresponding to three different ways of tackling environmental issues covering a period from the late 1970s up to the present. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it will use environmental policies as a tool to understand the transformations of urban governance, and in particular the transformations of the actors involved in policy-making. Second, it will show how sustainable development policies are used by local elites to neutralize urban conflicts by excluding environmental grassroots movements from the management of environmental issues. Finally, the article will discuss how this marginalization should be considered as a sign of the emergence of a post-democratic era.

Railway Station Role in Composing Urban Conflicts

Despite railway infrastructure was the structural framework on which modern European States were developed, contributing to unify territories and to the establishment of Nations, right from the beginning, the relationship between railway and city has been characterized by physical, functional and social conflicts, mainly because of a lack of integration between infrastructural and urban policies, which have been produced strong conflicts during decades. These critical situations have concentrated on the railway stations surrounding areas, which have started symbolizing the main conflicts that are taking place inside the cities. Similarly to what happened in the XIX century, today railway is a strategic infrastructure for the European territory development, thanks to the introduction of high speed transport systems and the promotion of rail transport as a more sustainable transportation system, which can quickly connect metropolitan central areas, more and more impenetrable by private vehicles, and key functions centres for the contemporary urban systems. In this framework, railway stations are becoming public places representing a complex society which is more and more dedicated to motion; thus they offer an unmissable chance not only to carry out urban development and spatial cohesion policies, but also to compose old tensions caused by the sharing of physical space, which is more and more scarce and valuable, and by ghettoization phenomena which have been produced at local scale, between rail infrastructure and the surrounding urban context. Today, such conflicts are growing and they are involving many actors who express a lot of different interests, needs and expectations, relating to the station areas’ destiny. Starting from the analysis of some conflicting situations between rail stations and the surrounding areas which have took place until today, this paper investigates some recent renewal interventions on Italian and European main railway nodes, their complex dynamics and the role of the most important players involved in these developments. Contemporary main rail stations are addressed as complex systems operating in a condition characterized by a dynamic balance among the different elements which form them; the interpretation of their polysemic nature allows to identify the most suitable design procedures and intervention strategies to make stations the privileged places where to compose the conflicts between contemporary city and railway. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify and to analyze crucial issues in order to build new liveable and effective developments. They refer, for instance, to the rail station configuration in order to be at the same time an efficient interchange transportation node and a meaningful and multifunctional city centre, but also to the detection of the most suitable tools and procedures to drive the urban and infrastructural transformations and to the proper involvement in the decision process of the different stakeholders who could be interested in these urban changes.