The New Urban Revolutions: Contentious Politics in the 21st Century (AV)

Question 1

What do a global urban politics look like?

Answer 1

Global (or planetary) urbanisation processes transform the nature of collective action.

Global urbanisation processes affect the formation of political subjectivities.

Global urbanisation processes point to new ways of imagining and occupying space.
(Boudreau, 2017)

Question 2

How does the urban impact upon political action?

Answer 2

Urbanisation generates particular objects of contention over access to particular rights and privileges.

Urbanisation provides a unique medium for political action.

Urbanisation creates spaces and infrastructures have agentive qualities. Political action in cities often depends on relations between human and non-human actors.
(Boudreau, 2017)

The city is thus a theatre for new forms of protest and a target of claim-making practices.

Question 3

How does Harvey (2012) conceptualise ‘the right to the city’?

Answer 3

“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, acommonrather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights”