Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

Fear and loathing in Kansas City: Political harassment and the making of moderates in America's abortion wars (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The pro‐life movement regularly employs tactics of political harassment in its campaign against abortion. As the murder of the controversial abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, demonstrated last year, such tactics often betray a potential for violence. This paper explores how the militant tactics of the pro‐life movement in the 1990s have contributed to the formation of a ‘new’ political identity in Kansas politics: that of the moderate Republican. But for those that seek to counter‐mobilize against the Christian right, the political stakes remain high.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.     

Evictions for development: Creative destruction,redistribution and the politics of unequal entitlements in inner-city Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), 2010–2018

Ethnographies on evictions and critical urban studies have showed how, globally, corporate and government seizure of urban space has been fundamental to the production of circuits of values under capitalism. This paper adds another layer to the scholarly understanding of evictions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on the economies of Addis Ababa's inner city and the politics of city building in Ethiopia's capital carried out between 2010 and 2018, I explore how evictions not only helped make room for private investments and urban regeneration. Evictions helped make the logics of investments and capital accumulation the framework within which the reach and the scope of policies of redistribution have been defined. By exploring how redistribution is made compatible with dispossession, this paper explores how evictions reshaped the terms of poor people's adverse incorporation in Addis Ababa's development through a political and moral economy of unequal entitlement.     

Engaged Universals and Community Economies: The (Human) Right to Water in Colombia

While the United Nations' sanctioning of the human right to water was widely celebrated, many debate the adequacy and political potency of the rights discourse to frame water justice. Drawing on multi‐sited, ethnographic‐based fieldwork in Colombia in 2010 and 2011, and prioritizing activists' reflexivity, the paper explores how water activists in the 2007–2011 referendum campaign engaged the universal human right while making user‐run community aqueducts more visible as place‐based, not‐for‐profit, culturally attuned, and valid alternatives to the corporate model of water supply. This case study suggests that the human right to water cannot be separated from water commons, and that communal users and activists engage the universal under their own terms. It also suggests we think of these water models as “economic communities” in Gibson‐Graham's sense: ethical spaces to make explicit our social relations with water, and to cultivate selves and practices that enact alternative socio‐natural relations through water's circulations.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Celebrating the prophet: religious nationalism and the politics of Milad‐un‐Nabi festivals in India

The traditional honoring of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed (Milad‐un‐Nabi) has shifted in numerous Indian cities from private prayer and ritual meals in the home to grand public festivals that bear resemblances to Hindu religious processions. In 2010 in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, large‐scale Milad‐un‐Nabi festivals became implicated in Hindu–Muslim nationalist riots that erupted weeks later at the commencement of a Hindu festival for Hanuman Jayanthi. This paper explores the political production of Muslim ethno‐nationalism and the intra‐community debates over the legitimacy and piety of Milad‐un‐Nabi celebrations. It argues that Milad‐un‐Nabi as a public performance is a (re)invented tradition that is part of the struggle for material, political and symbolic goods of the nation‐state. It is shaped by local party politics and history of anti‐Muslim discrimination. However, as the festivals highlight community divisions and religious ambiguities, they ultimately reveal the fragility of ethnic groups.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

Evaluating social sustainability in historic urban environments

Government policies aimed at the alleviation of poverty and social exclusion have been moving toward a multi-faceted approach that includes community capacity building and collaborative partnerships. This implies greater community consultation and the involvement of public and private institutions and the voluntary sector in the democratic management of local affairs. While these are established theoretical concepts, implementing localised social policy and measuring the outcomes are notoriously difficult, particularly in historic urban areas where democratic decision making has the potential to conflict with the management of heritage value. Drawing on recent policy and academic literature, this paper explores the concept of social sustainability and the characteristics of its evaluation. The paper illustrates how social sustainability indicators favour multi-dimensional themes that support national political agendas. The tension between this and the rise of participatory governance is highlighted. The paper concludes with a suggested approach to the evaluation of social sustainability in historic urban environments.     

Citizenship as Non‐Discrimination: Acceptance or Assimilationism? Political Logic and Emotional Investment in Campaigns for Aboriginal Rights in Australia, 1940 to 1970

This article explores the relationship between the United Nations sponsored principle of non‐discrimination and the policy of assimilation in the context of campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. The principle of non‐discrimination was important to the elaboration of the goal of an equal citizenship, to the fight against the practice of segregation and as a basis for political organisation. The campaign for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal citizenship was led by an inter‐racial, cross‐class alliance of women, whose common commitments were, however, shaped by different emotional and historical investments and different logics of pain. Hence, the large ‘Yes’ vote was an ambiguous triumph: from an Aboriginal point of view full acceptance into the nation‐state could also mean their ultimate assimilation as a people. Moreover, in allowing for the leadership of women, coalitional politics could lead to the political domination of women and thus exacerbate the emasculation of Aboriginal men. This article focuses on the emotional structure of political subjectivities and the gendered and racialised dynamics of their formation.     

The Iron Triangle of Urban Entrepreneurialism: The Political Economy of Urban Corruption in Spain

Despite a cascade of corruption scandals over the last decade, the role of political corruption has yet to be accounted for in the scholarship on Spanish urban entrepreneurialism. This is an omission that extends to the broader literature on the topic as well. This paper looks at the theoretical causes of this neglect and explores ways of integrating corruption into the study of urban entrepreneurialism. To do so, it offers a systematic analysis of the role of clientelism in the political economy of Spanish inter-urban competition. Contrary to the existing literature, which at best explains away corruption as a logical outgrowth of intensified competition for real estate capital, this paper argues that corruption is rooted in a political structure that precedes the emergence of urban entrepreneurialism. This structure is identified as an “iron triangle”, a complex of colluding interests formed by the state, the real estate industry, and political parties.     

Campaigning and governing: an analysis of berlusconi's rhetorical leadership

This article explores the communication strategy of Silvio Berlusconi through the analytical framework of the ‘permanent campaign’ model. Beginning with the distinction between ‘personal popularity’ and ‘political consensus’, the article looks at the different aspects of Berlusconi's political communication strategy since his election victory in May 2001 and assesses the rationale and effectiveness of his permanent campaign. The author concludes that, despite Berlusconi's strong commitment to the communication process, his leadership appears more similar to the rhetorical Presidency model than to the experiences of leaders who have shown that campaigning can also be used to govern. The article identifies two key limits: (1) the link between the drive for personal popularity and the building of support for the government's main policies appears weak; (2) all communication strategies are undermined by deep divisions within the ruling coalition.     

From Revanchism to Ambivalence: The Changing Politics of Street Vending in Guangzhou

By focusing on Guangzhou's street‐vending policy transformation, this article explores how exclusionary practices of urban politics in China are undermined by those who it seeks to exclude and the progressive political climate that questions the exclusionary framework. The exclusion of street vendors in Guangzhou has been led by the National Sanitary City campaign as a revanchist project. It has been discovered that while the exclusionary strategies are rendered difficult to operate due to the resistance of street vendors who develop a flexible, individualized and small‐scale activism to maintain their livelihoods, the discourse of social harmony at national level has driven local authorities to seek alternatives expected to alleviate social resistance and address people's livelihoods. However, rather than an overturn of the punitive framework, an ambivalent approach, recognized in a recent critique of revanchism, has been adopted to mediate the tension between the needs to retain attractive city images and address the livelihoods of the poor in Chinese cities.     

‘Buy and promote the national cause’: consumption,class formation and nationalism in Mandate Palestinian society1

ABSTRACT. This article deals with patterns of consumption and of advertisement, as a field for the analysis of two major processes in the Palestinian society of Mandate Palestine: the growth of an urban middle class and the consolidation of the Palestinian national movement. The advertisements, sampled from the popular daily paper Filastin, analysed in the context of political and economic events, highlight the complex interplay between nationalism and class formation, and the contradictory tensions between the two processes. A smaller sampling in al‐Difa' points to similar, though not identical, trends. This analysis also highlights new dimensions of the Jewish–Arab conflict by drawing attention to the semi‐private sphere of consumption which appears to have been less segregated than the more often studied political and economic spheres.     

Mapping the European Urban Left: The Barcelona Experience

This paper explores the transition in Barcelona's city council's urban policy during 20 years of uninterrupted political control. It focuses particularly on several trends within Pasqual Maragall's period in office (1982–1997) and argues that issues of leadership, extramunicipal policy and electoral rationality are fundamental to understanding the full complexity of this transition. The paper seeks to locate the Barcelona experience in a comparative context and calls for a greater sensitivity to the contemporary political geography of the European urban left.     

Beyond moving people: excavating the motivations for investing in urban public transit infrastructure in Bilbao Spain

This paper explores the context and contradictions that have brought Bilbao Spain, a city of some 1 million inhabitants, to its stature as a leader and model of contemporary public transit. The decision to invest in public transit infrastructure is situated within an urban context that includes historical, economic, urban design, social, environmental and political motivations. From this contextual rooting, public transit projects are examined for their potential to achieve both a tangible set of objectives and an intangible symbolic meaning that presents transit projects as being about more than just moving people.     

Transition Urbanism and the Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making

Abstract: This paper explores the contested construction of more relational urban imaginaries within a movement that is simultaneously committed to enhanced systems of care for distant places/others, and intensified regimes of (re)localisation. Transition Culture initiatives explore ‘how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world’ and stem from a concern for a post peak‐oil global future. While the radical political openness of Transition Culture is in keeping with the vision of a more diverse polity imagined by advocates of relational space (for instance Amin, 2004), we argue that this openness is predicated upon an apolitical pragmatism that masks latent tensions between an environmentally benign localism and an ethics of care at‐a‐distance. If a transitional ethics of space occupies the uncertain ground between a relational and territorial geographical imagination, the Transition Culture movement provides a rich context within which to explore the ethical conundrums that stem from different tactics of place‐making.     

Electoral instability and the modern campaign: New Zealand labour in 1987

This essay explores the theme of the rise of the ‘modern campaign'—the electoral focus on polling, targeted appeals, and the professional, managed use of the media—as the strategic response by parties to the exigencies of electioneering in an era of increasingly fluid, weakly partisan electorates. Given New Zealand Labour's unparalleled policy‐reversals since 1984, which rocked a political system noted for its stable, loyal partisan politics, it is argued the 1987 campaign constitutes a threshold election in which Labour's executive consciously embraced the modern campaign to deflect reactions to its unorthodox policies, and to allow appeals to newly heterogeneous bases of electoral support. Interviews with key figures in New Zealand's Labour and National parlies afford the chance to examine this strategic tactic as a considered response to electoral uncertainty.     

Faith no more? The divergence of political trust between urban and rural Europe

Events such as Brexit and the Gilet Jaunes protests have highlighted the spatial nature of populism. In particular, there has been increasing political divergence between urban and rural areas, with rural areas apparently having lost faith in national governments. We investigate this divergence using data on over 125,000 EU citizens from the European Social Survey from 2008 to 2018. We show that people in rural areas have lower political trust than urban or peri-urban residents, with this difference clear for six different forms of political institutions, including politicians, political parties, and national parliaments. There has been divergence of political trust between urban and rural Europe since 2008, although this is primarily driven by Southern Europe. While these results can partly be explained by demographic differences between cities and the countryside, divergent economic experiences, differences in values, and perceptions that public services are less effective outside of urban areas, there is a residual ‘rural effect’ beyond this. We argue that the polarisation of urban-rural political trust has important implications for the functioning of European democracies.     

SPACE,TRUST, AND COMMUNAL ACTION: RESULTS FROM FIELD EXPERIMENTS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA*

ABSTRACT This paper examines the spatial dimensions of trust in two Southeast Asian cities using data from both household surveys and field experiments conducted in low‐income communities. The results suggest that space and location are important to understanding communal action and trust in developing countries. Not surprisingly, space matters in different ways depending on culture, history and the political‐economy of a particular country or city.