1st Edition

City Unsilenced Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy

Edited By Jeffrey Hou, Sabine Knierbein Copyright 2017
    268 Pages 66 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    268 Pages 66 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics?

    City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria).

    By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy.

     

    Acknowledgement

    Introduction

    1. Shrinking Democracy and Urban Resistance: Toward an Emancipatory Politics of Public Space

    Jeffrey Hou and Sabine Knierbein

     

    Part I. Mobilizing: Taking to the Streets!

    2. Between Street and Home: Mobility, Housing, and the 2013 Demonstrations in Brazil

    Luciana da Silva Andrade and João Paulo Huguenin

    3. San Francisco’s Tech-led Gentrification: Public Space, Protest, and the Urban Commons

    Manissa M. Maharawal

    4. Reconfiguring the Public through Housing Rights Struggles in Spain

    Melissa García-Lamarca

    5. Urban Resistance and Its Expression in Public Space: New Demands and Shared Meanings in Argentina

    Paula Rosa and Regina Vidosa

     

    Part 2. Reclaiming: From Public Space to the Political

    6. Reclaiming Public Space Movement in Hong Kong: From Occupy Queen’s Pier to the Umbrella Movement

    Yun-Chung Chen and Mirana M. Szeto

    7. Occupy Gezi Park: the Never-ending Search for Democracy, Public Space and Alternative City-making

    Burcu Yiğit Turan

    8. The Right to the Sidewalk: the Struggle over Broken Windows Policing, Young People, and NYC Streets

    Caitlin Cahill, Brett G. Stoudt, Amanda Matles, Kim Belmonte, Selma Djokovic, Jose Lopez, Adilka Pimentel, María Elena Torre, and Darian X.

    9. Leveling the Playfield: Urban Movement in the Strategic Action Field of Urban Policy in Poland

    Anna Domaradzka

     

    Part 3. Negotiating: Urban Resistance and Emerging (Counter) Publics

    10. Athens’ Syntagma Square Re-loaded: From Staging Disagreement Towards Instituting Democratic Spaces

    Maria Kaika and Lazaros Karaliotas

    11. Democracy, Occupy Legislature and Taiwan´s Sunflower Movement

    Ketty W. Chen

    12. Shifting Struggles over Public Space and Public Goods in Berlin: Urban Activism between Protest and Participation

    Henrik Lebuhn

    13. Occupied Oakland, Past and Present: Land Action on the New Urban Frontier

    Marcus Owens and Christina Antiporda

     

    Part 4. Contesting: Against Backlashes, Criminalization, Cooptation and Anti-Pluralism

    14. Operation 1DMX and the Mexico City Commune: The Right to the City Beyond the Rule of Law in Public Spaces

    Silvano De la Llata Gonzalez

    15. Public Space in a Parallel Universe: Conflict, Coexistence and Co-optation between Alternative Urbanisms and the Neoliberalizing City

    Elina Kränzle

    16. Miyashita Park, Tokyo: Contested Visions of Public Space in Contemporary Urban Japan

    Christian Dimmer

    17. Worlded Resistance as ‘Alter’ Politics: Train of Hope and the Protest against the Akademikerball in Vienna

    Sabine Knierbein and Angelika Gabauer

    Conclusions

    18. City Unsilenced: Spatial Grounds of Radical Democratization

    Sabine Knierbein and Jeffrey Hou

    Note on Contributors

    Index

     

    Biography

    Jeffrey Hou is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work focuses on design activism, public space, and cross-cultural placemaking. He is the editor of Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010) and he was the City of Vienna Visiting Professor at TU Wien (2013).

    Sabine Knierbein is Associate Professor for Urban Culture and Public Space at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning, TU Wien. She currently coordinates the AESOP Thematic Group for Public Spaces and Urban Cultures. She is the editor of Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation in Europe (2014) and Public Space and Relational Perspectives: New Challenges for Architecture and Planning (2015).

    "The book documents a moment of resistance that has spread around the world – moving from the Global South to the Global North – and that has attracted castes of people who are not the usual suspects out into the streets. In so many places and cultural contexts, as the pace of social, economic and political disenfranchisement increases, and more people find themselves on the outside of taken-for-granted social systems, the accounts in City Unsilenced shout out loud: these things really happened." -Urban Studies

    "This cutting-edge collection raises important and salient questions and provocations about urban resistance in the context of dominant neoliberal practices in many cities in the contemporary era. Its distinctiveness lies not only in its excellent critical analysis but also in its breadth of case studies, drawing insights from a variety of sites and cities across the globe. This is a must-read for urbanists and activists who recognise the crucial importance of public space for transformative urban politics."-Sophie Watson, Professor of Sociology, The Open University

    "In response to austerity politics and market-based governance of urban land, large-scale social protest has erupted in the public spaces of cities across the globe. In City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy, editors Jeffrey Hou of UW-Seattle and Sabine Knierbein of SKuOR, Vienna – both scholars of the dynamics of public space –have compiled the stories, strategies and the-ories derived from social movements in urban spaces since 2011. In this volume, the collected authors demonstrate how public spaces in cities operate as both the subject and object of civic unrest." - Naomi Adiv, Portland State University, USA