In what ways has global urbanization affected the political process? This book offers a reflection on the transformations of urban politics worldwide in the past four decades, from interpersonal street-level politics to transnational governing institutions. Organized thematically, the book examines urban social movements, diversity politics, environmental politics and security politics at a global level and argues that living in an urban world calls for a profound rethinking of how we act politically. Through ethnographic incursions into the worlds of youth activists, domestic workers, rioters, barrio bandits and peripheral villagers, among others, from Mexico City and Hanoi to Montreal and New York, the book makes a number of theoretical propositions to redefine the field of urban political studies. Extending the view of urban politics beyond municipal and metropolitan institutions to the broader political process in cities, this book will be invaluable to advanced students and scholars interested in our urban future. For, as Boudreau convincingly suggests, global urban life is political life.
Autorentext
Julie-Anne Boudreau is Associate Professor in the Urbanisation Culture Société Research Centre at the National Institute for Scientific Research (INRS), Montreal.
Inhalt
Figures xi
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
Defining the urban 7
Defining the contours of an alternative field of urban political studies 15
Organization of the book 19
1 Where are the Global Urban Politics? 23
Where are the urban politics? From municipalism to a new political ontology 25
Where are politics? Urban life is political life 33
Changing relations to space: bounded and networked political spaces 34
Changing relations with time: non-linear conceptions of political change 38
La Paz, Bolivia 43
Changing relationship with affective rationalities: from calculative decision-making to affective politics 45
Where is the global in urban politics? Uneven connections and power relations 53
Informalization of the state 58
Conclusion 61
2 Global Urban Social Movements: Emerging Forms of Political Action 65
What are global urban social movements? 70
Why and how do we become politically engaged? Discordant moments, mobility practices and continuity with everyday life 78
Emerging forms of urban political mobilization 90
Youthfulness and urban political action 92
'Open-ended urbanisms' 96
Dégagisme or the politics of anti-power 98
Conclusion 100
3 Global Diversity Politics: Thinking Citizenship 102
Cities as 'difference machines': from managing diversity in cities to difference as constitutive of urbanity 105
The routes of undocumented immigrants, the neighbour and the identity card 109
The smuggling routes of socio-economic crisis, patriarchy and urbanity 113
Rethinking citizenship 116
Conclusion 125
4 Global Environmental Politics: Multiple Conceptions of Time 127
Local environmental conflicts: engaging various conceptions of time 132
The temporalities of the 'project': directional trajectory and duration 136
The temporalities of financing: pace 137
The temporalities of inhabiting new spaces: cycles 139
The temporalities of environmental degradation: directional trajectory clashing with circular metabolic cycles 141
Alternative temporalities and political action 142
Global environmental politics: articulating metabolic flows at various speeds and scales 144
A changing conception of time affecting the political process 147
Conclusion 148
5 Global Urban Security Politics: Re-emerging Rationalities of Action 150
Urban nightmares: home security and alien invasions 153
Affective micro-politics and re-emerging forms of political action 157
Conclusion 167
Conclusion: Global Urban Politics and the Informalization of the State 171
Critical urban studies: pragmatism between postcolonialism and structuralism 176
Political action and moral ambiguity: thinking in terms of stabilizing regimes 179
Notes 185
Bibliography 191
Index 207