scholarly journals Civic media and technologies of belonging: Where digital citizenship and ‘the right to the city’ converge

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giota Alevizou
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Digital Citizenship ◽  
Action Research Project ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This article contributes to an emerging field of ‘urban communication’ research and its intersections with civic culture and digital citizenship. It does so by presenting a case study of how an activist group in North London’s Tottenham region co-designed bespoke digital media platforms, akin to civic media, to advocate an approach to urban planning that also recognizes migrants’ rights. Conducted as a part of a broader participatory action research project, the study outlined here offers an analysis of the online and offline communicative routes taken, the urban rights enacted and the visions expressed during an eight-week consultation period. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative metrics from the official and alternative digital platforms inviting consultation around the community-led planning application, the article offers insights about the co-construction of space, and the effect that the particular site had in unearthing wider enactments of ‘the right to the city’ and affective belonging, alongside struggles against threats of displacement. By offering these insights, the study contributes to a better understanding of the digital mediation of belonging through space/place and what this means for urban citizenship. Looking beyond processes of urban planning, this understanding seeks to contribute to wider debates of urban citizenship, often expressed at the intersection of urban rights, digital citizenship and virtual reality.

Attempts at City Self-Empowerment

City, State ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 151-172
Author(s):  
Ran Hirschl
Keyword(s):  
Affordable Housing ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Efficient Construction ◽  
The Right ◽  
Community Representation ◽  
Refugees And Asylum Seekers ◽  
The City

This chapter examines efforts by constitutionally voiceless cities and mayors to expand cities’ quasi-constitutional powers through urban citizenship schemes or, more frequently, through international networking and collaboration based on notions such as “the right to the city,” “sustainable cities,” “solidarity cities,” and “human rights cities.” For the most part, such initiatives have a socially progressive undercurrent to them. They address policy areas such as air quality and energy efficient construction, “smart cities,” affordable housing, enhanced community representation, or accommodating policies toward refugees and asylum seekers. Such experimentation with city self-emancipation is increasing in popularity and possesses significant potential in policy areas not directly addressed or hermetically foreclosed by statist constitutional law.

Citizenship at the Margins: Exploring Participation as ‘Right to the City’ in Vizhinjam, Kerala

Urbanisation ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Aarathi Ganga
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Fishing Community ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The Right ◽  
National Governments ◽  
The City

This article explores the nature of urban citizenship among fishers in Kerala, one of the state’s most marginalised communities, by analysing their participation in a centrally sponsored slum rehabilitation programme—Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY)—in Vizhinjam, Thiruvananthapuram. The ‘right to participate’ is considered an integral part of the ‘right to the city’, and the inability of the fishing community to participate in the decision-making processes of urban development programmes that directly affect their lives reveals the exclusionary nature of their citizenship. In a state that is renowned for its achievements in human development and governance, the fishing community continues to be marginalised and lack collective power to influence policies. Participatory meetings in such contexts become tokenistic, and their transformative capacity is undermined. The inefficiency of participatory meetings organised under RAY also stems from the powerlessness of local governments to alter urban programmes designed by national governments.

scholarly journals Improvising “Nonexistent Rights”: Immigrants, Ethnic Restaurants, and Corporeal Citizenship in Suburban California

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 79-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Right To The City ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
City Life ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Right ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring ◽  
Democratic Transformation ◽  
The City

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s radical concept of “right to the city,” contemporary literatures on urban citizenship critically shift the locus of citizenship from its juridical-political foundation in the sovereign state to the spatial politics of the urban inhabitants. However, while the political discourse of right to the city presents a vital vision for urban democracy in the shadow of neoliberal restructuring, its exclusive focus on democratic agency and practices can become disconnected from the everyday experiences of city life on the ground. In fact, in cities that lack longstanding/viable urban citizenship mechanisms that can deliver meaningful political participation, excluded subjects may bypass formal democratic channels to improvise their own inclusion, belonging, and rights in an informal space that the sovereign power does not recognize. Drawing on my fieldwork in the Asian restaurant industry in several multiethnic suburbs in Southern California, this article investigates how immigrant restaurant entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers engender a set of “nonexistent rights” through their everyday production and consumption of ethnic food. I name this improvisational political ensemble corporeal citizenship to describe the material, affective, and bodily dimensions of inclusion, belonging, and “rights” that immigrants actualize through their everyday participation in this suburban ethnic culinary commerce. For many immigrants operating in the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism, citizenship no longer just means what Hannah Arendt (1951) once suggested as “the right to have rights,” or what Engin Isin and Peter Nyers (2014) reformulate as “the right to claim rights,” but also the right to reinvent ways of claiming rights. I suggest such improvisation of nonexistent rights has surprising political implications for unorthodox ways of advancing democratic transformation.

scholarly journals High-capacity transport, floor area ratio and its relationship with urbanization of metropolitan areas

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Luis De Carvalho da Costa ◽  
Fabiene Cristina De Carvalho da Costa
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
High Capacity ◽  
Area Ratio ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Floor Area ◽  
Floor Area Ratio ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

Most of the world’s population lives in urban areas (54%). Near 42% of the global urban population live in cities with more than 1 million inhabitants, where problems associated with urban sprawl such as informal settlement, social-economic changes, environmental degradation and deficient high-capacity transport (HCT) systems are common. Meanwhile, urbanization and its associated transportation infrastructure define the relationship between city and countryside, between the city’s inner core and the periphery, between the citizen and his right to move. This article discusses and presents an overview about the relationship between the planning and extension of HCT systems and urban planning, (in the figure of the floor-area ratio - FAR- prescribed in regulations). The methodological approach consists of drawing a conceptual framework and studying 33 different cities of metropolitan areas on five continents. It’s noticed that areas in cities with a high construction potential but with an insufficient HCT negatively influence in urban mobility and hence the right to the city. We consider right to the city the various social and fundamental rights that, among others, includes the right to public transportation. Therefore there’s a real need of an integrated approach of community participation, FAR distribution, urban planning and transportation planning and so that urbanization, inevitable these days, takes place in a fair and harmonious way.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2016.3762 

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