From Preamble to Post‐project Frustrations: The Shaping of a Slum Upgrading Project in Recife,Brazil

Abstract: This article presents an ethnography of the evolution of Prometrópole, a slum upgrading project in the Brazilian city of Recife. The project aims to improve the urban infrastructure, eradicate slums and resettle the population. We focus on the project's first area of intervention, Jacarezinho. We analyze how, from lead‐up through implementation, the project gained shape and gradually became real. Participatory procedures were very important in shaping the project that for a long time did not materialize. We argue that the project manifested itself as a vehicle of modernity that evoked a dream of progress. The population, which never asked for the project, was attracted to this dream, but remained critical. We contend that, although the project partly delivered on its promises, for many slum dwellers it failed to entail a better life. We portray the project's genealogy, the compromise between different aims, and an echelon of post‐project frustrations.     

Blondel,the Philosophy of Action and Liberation Theology

Abstract

Maurice Blondel's philosophy of action and concrete political theology provide foundations for modern theologies of action. By commencing with the reflective subject, Blondel compensates the deficiencies of collectivist Marxist social analysis. He did not live to complete his account of the social, political and economic implications of his philosophy, but they are realized in the work and witness of others: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Yves de Montcheuil, Henri de Lubac and John McNeill. Liberation theologians of diverse persuasions need especially to acknowledge their debt to Blondel in an era when, in Western societies, the fundamental context of action is no longer material but intellectual, spiritual and interpersonal. The abstract nature of his thought means that he frequently opens suggestive paths into further reflection rather than prescribing complete solutions to specific practical questions.     

Empire,Deep Solidarity,and the Future of Liberation Theology*

In recent years the term empire has been used to describe an oppressive global situation. Empires are marked by their efforts to control all of life, not only politics and economics, but also society, culture, and religion. Since their inception, liberation theologies have addressed this oppressive global situation by focusing on its various manifestations in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class. As the oppressive global situation tightens and contemporary liberation movements increasingly bring together its various manifestations, liberation theologies need to devise common strategies and models for resistance without abandoning their diverse legacies.     

A Response to Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins,Religion, Politics and the Earth: The New Materialism1

Crockett's and Robbins' significant and groundbreaking book falls short of a genuinely liberating future, one that can put in place alternative social and institutional forms to sustain a comprehensive freedom from structural domination. This major claim is sustained by tracing four deficiencies in the book: (a) its sanguine trust to a developmentalist sensibility that underestimates political antagonism; (b) another neglect of political antagonism in its trust to transformative powers of a “multitude” and its cooperative activity, (c) its failure to build social and political formation into its theory of emergent complexity, and (4) its failure in reflexivity, to interrogate the “we” discourse that proliferates in authors' senses of crisis and calls for transformation.     

The Practice of Participatory Planning at Mapoon Aboriginal Settlement: Towards Community Control,Ownership and Autonomy

The practice of participatory planning in discrete Indigenous settlements has been established since the early 1990s. In addition to technical and economic goals, participatory planning also seeks community development outcomes, including community control, ownership and autonomy. This paper presents an evaluation of one such planning project, conducted at Mapoon in 1995. The Plan successfully improved physical infrastructure and housing, but had mixed success in terms of community development. Despite various efforts to follow participatory processes, the Plan was essentially a passing event, community control progressively diminished after its completion, and outcomes fell short of notions of ownership and autonomy. This suggests some misunderstandings between the practice of participatory planning and the workings of governance.     

Ignatian Spirituality,Political Effectiveness,and Spiritual Discernment: Dean Brackley's Account of Liberation Theology

Dean Brackley offers a helpful, yet underutilized, way to understand liberation theology, namely as a politically and more than politically effective practice of spiritual discernment: a way of life in which one contemplatively and actively distinguishes the true divine liberator from false idols of death. Like several other Jesuit Catholic liberation theologians, Brackley draws on Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises – but he does so more persuasively, thoroughly, and accessibly. While some critics question whether liberation theology is too political, as if it reduced the human relationship with God down to worldly criteria of effectiveness, and others question whether it is too theological, as if its Christian faith commitments necessarily obstructed its practical aims, Brackley provides a promising way forward by turning to spirituality. His method of spiritual discernment not only overcomes political reductionism; it also supports an effective praxis of liberation by transforming self and community through an immersive meditation on Christ.     

Ecclesial opposition to nonferrous mining in Guatemala: neoliberalism meets the church of the poor in a shattered society

Guatemala, a nation plagued by the legacy of its brutal 36-year civil war, has, in recent years liberalized its mining law to encourage the entry of multinational mining corporations. These mining companies have included two Canadian companies, which have developed the two most prominent, and controversial, mining projects in Guatemala. Using the lens of political ecology to demonstrate how environmental analysis and policy can be reframed towards addressing the problems of the socially vulnerable, this article analyses the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church to mining in Guatemala. The article reviews the development of liberation theology in Latin America and how this has imparted empathy for the poor into the pastoral praxis of the church. The church is opposed to mining largely because of the potential implications of mining's environmental effects upon the livelihoods of the poor. The article postulates that the opposition of the church to mining is an example of an environmental issue connecting groups of people across class and ethnic lines to offset powerful global political and economic forces. The article concludes with a discussion of how this opposition to mining is a demonstration of the opposition of the progressive church to neoliberalism in general.     

Barack Obama's Political Theology: Pluralism,Deliberative Democracy,and the Christian Faith

Abstract

Obama won the 2008 election precisely because he crafted a political theology that enabled him to create a truly progressive Democratic Party religious and racial-ethnic minority platform that welcomed pro-choice and pro-life social-justice leaning Catholics and Evangelicals into a new coalition. His political theology was directly influenced by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright and the black church civil rights tradition, white liberal Protestantism, his mother Ann Dunham's skepticism and free spirit, and Evangelical and Catholic leaders, advisors and opponents. Obama's best and most comprehensive statement on his political theology is his chapter on "Faith" in his New York Times No.1 best-selling autobiography The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006). Obama contends that religiously motivated people must learn the art of compromise, proportion, and how to find shared values. They must translate their religious concerns and vision for America into universal rather than religion-specific values, which must be subject to debate, amenable to reason, and applicable to people of all lifestyles and faiths or no faith at all. They should also be willing to sublimate their ultimate theological and religious convictions for the common collective good. Secular people likewise must adopt a similar approach towards religious people and activists.     

World Making,Critical Pedagogies,and the Geographical Imagination: Where Youth Work Meets Participatory Research

Renewed interest in the critical geographies of education has raised productive yet under‐examined synergies with reflections taking place among radical youth work and participatory research practitioners. In particular, such intersections point to important ways that the geographical imagination might advance a critical yet creative means of learning through the living material forces of everyday worlds. This paper examines this common ground through a collaborative, London‐based case study exploring young people's sense of home and belonging in the inner‐city. It argues that cross‐overs between the praxis of participatory research and youth work offer generative potential to act alongside young people in the production of autonomous geographical knowledges. Specifically, the case is made for prioritising an imaginative, experiential and intersubjective pedagogical process of “world making”, as an alternative to practices that intervene in, act upon and ultimately “other” the everyday lives of young people.     

Unconsented Sterilisation,Participatory Story‐Telling,and Digital Counter‐Memory in Peru

This article aims to prompt reflection on the ways in which digital research methods can support or undermine participatory research. Building on our experiences of working on the Quipu Project ( quipu‐project.com ), an interactive, multimedia documentary on unconsented sterilisation in Peru, it explores the ways in which digital technologies can enable participatory knowledge production across geographic, social and linguistic divides. It also considers the new forms of engagement between knowledge‐producers and audiences that digital methods can encourage. Digital technologies can, we contend, help build new spaces for, and modes of engagement with, participatory research, even in contexts such as the Peruvian Andes where digital technologies are not well established or commonly used. Doing so, we argue, entails responding sensitively to the social, linguistic and digital inequalities that shape specific research contexts, and centring the human relationships that are easily sacrificed at the altar of technological innovation.     

Canaan Banana,Churches and the Land Issue: Revisiting Theology of Zimbabwe’s Vilified Prophet

ABSTRACT

This study seeks to revisit and evaluate the “combat theology” developed by Canaan Banana, a contemporary theologian, Methodist minister and the first president of Zimbabwe, notably with regard to the issue of land dispossession. It does so primarily against the backdrop of the historical analysis of the ways in which power operated at the intersection of religion and politics during the first three decades after Zimbabwe’s attainment of political independence (1980). The article interrogates several facets of Banana’s liberationist view of justice with regard to the land issue, including (a) speaking truth to political power, regardless of consequences; (b) bearing a prophetic witness vis-à-vis the church’s own complicity in wrongdoing; as well as (c) making a distinction between the selective acts of “liberating violence” and the systemic violence inherent in unjust socio-political structures.     

Participatory video drama research in transitional Vietnam: post-production narratives on marriage,parenting and social evils

Based on two years of participatory video drama (PVD) research with men and women in the city of Hu?, this article explores perspectives on, and experiences of, socio-economic transition and its influence on domestic life in Vietnam. Through a combination of output analysis, group screening sessions and individual interviews, it concentrates on the themes of marriage, parenting and ‘social evils’ which emerged in the PVD. It demonstrates how familial tensions collectively identified in the workshop and told in a single video-narrative are complicated by the more nuanced discourses that emerge from co-produced analysis in the post-production period. These illuminate a greater plurality of voices towards the liberalisation of the Vietnamese economy and the new life choices that this brings.     

Communicative and participatory paradigm in the European territorial policies. A discourse analysis

Communicative planning has been widely criticized for having little to do with the official legal procedures and for low-quality spatial solutions. It has also been blamed to be an empty concept, referring to an action that in itself has no content. This critique gives ground to the question: what is actually the role of the communicative and participatory paradigm in contemporary territorial policies? In this paper, we adopt discourse analysis methods to study the European documents on spatial planning in their three characteristic strands: smart city, integrated planning and multilevel governance. By extracting eight core principles (governance, sustainability, communication, participation, resilience, innovation, cooperation and coordination), we measure the importance of the communicative and participatory paradigm in the current planning discourse in Europe. We find that despite critique it remains one of the fundamental building-blocks of the European territorial policy. Communicative planning principles are visibly present in all the analysed strands of spatial planning in Europe.     

Participatory and community‐based research,Indigenous geographies,and the spaces of friendship: A critical engagement

Geographic engagement with Indigenous peoples remains inextricably linked to colonialism. Consequently, studying Indigenous geographies is fraught with ethical and political dilemmas. Participatory and community‐based research methods have recently been offered as one solution to address concerns about the politics of gathering, framing, producing, disseminating, and controlling knowledge about Indigenous peoples. In this article, we critically engage with the emergence of participatory and community‐based research methods as “best practice” for undertaking research into Indigenous geographies. We articulate four concerns with this form of research: a) dissent may be stifled by non‐Indigenous researchers’ investments in being “good”; b) claims to overcome difference and distance may actually retrench colonial research relations; c) the framing of particular methods as “best practices” risks closing down necessary and ongoing critique; and d) institutional pressures work against the development and maintenance of meaningful, accountable, and non‐extractive relations with Indigenous communities. We then contemplate the spatiality of the critique itself. We consider the ways in which our longstanding friendship, as researchers invested at multiple scales with Indigenous geographies and identities, provides its own distinct space of practice within which to confront the political and ethical challenges posed by research with/about/upon Indigenous geographies and peoples. While not arriving at any concrete template for undertaking research about Indigenous geographies, we suggest that certain friendships, established and situated outside research relationships, may be productive spaces within and through which research methods may be decolonized.     

‘Make No Little Plans’: Anatomy of Planning Ambition and Prospect

This review paper applies a critical geographic perspective to analysis of planning ambition and prospect. Its point of departure is that planning, an applied spatial science, has lacked consistent review from critical geography in recent decades. The consequences of this drift for planning conception and practice are considered, focusing on the influential construct, the compact city. The review finds evidence of serious epistemological and methodological flaws in planning thought and ambition; failings that were earlier identified and analysed in the break with positivism in geographical sciences. The consequences of these limitations for planning thought and practice are considered. Broadly they undermine the ability of the compact city ideal to address what is arguably the most critical threat facing humanity, climate change. Specifically, the proposition that urban density has straightforward influences on human behaviour, including resource use, is without scientific foundation. Planning has a critically important part to play in climate response: securing the resilience and well‐being of an increasingly urbanised human species. Urban compaction may not achieve these ends.     

20世纪50年代上海的妇女解放与参加集体生产

在国家的主导与大力推动下,以"为社会主义添砖加瓦"为口号的妇女解放运动使20世纪50年代后期的上海家庭妇女纷纷走出家门,进入企业和里弄工厂(场),成为发展社会主义经济的重要劳动力量。然而,此时的社会性解放却是以性别差异的忽略与"男主外、女主内"的传统模式的延续为前提的,因此,走出家庭的妇女不得不同时面临工作、家庭的双重压力。后来随着"大跃进"、城市人民公社化运动的失败,许多已经走出家庭的妇女在别无选择的情况下重回家庭。但是,50年代后期上海家庭妇女走出家庭的经历为她们再次走出家庭并最终走向全面解放奠定了初步基础。     

解放后北京城市住宅的规划与建设

解放后,新中国的首都面临着只有安居才能乐业的巨大挑战,中共北京市委和市政府坚持"为生产服务、为中央服务、为劳动人民服务"的方针,在百废待兴和建设新首都的前提下,逐步解决城市居民的住宅问题。改革开放以来,围绕着北京住宅的规划和建设,北京市委和市政府采取了成片开发与危旧房改造并举、房改与改善住房条件并举、市场运作与宏观调控相结合等项措施,使北京在进入新世纪的时候,以城市居民人均17 62平方米的住房面积而达到小康水平。北京作为历史古都、文化名城和新中国的首都,其住宅建设应有其历史的继承性和创新性。     

Analysing Contemporary Metropolitan Spatial Plans in Europe Through Their Institutional Context,Instrumental Content and Planning Process

This article sets out to propose and apply a qualitative framework for thinking about how to analyse and compare metropolitan spatial plans in a milieu of divergent spatial planning traditions and discretionary planning practices. In doing so, the article reviews and develops an understanding concerning the institutional context, instrumental content and planning processes associated with four contemporary metropolitan spatial plans in Europe, namely those of London, Copenhagen, Paris and Barcelona. Through the results of a multiple case study and a subsequent cross-comparative analysis, the article stresses that contemporary metropolitan spatial plans tend to merge the characteristics associated with project-based and strategy-based spatial plans, thus contrasting with the typical land-use character of municipal plans and the often strategic, growth-oriented pursuit of regional plans in Europe. In this sense, the metropolitan scale is treated less explicitly as a planning scale per se; rather, it tends to emerge as a “concealed” scale between municipal and regional scales and also between local and regional knowledge in planning. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while metropolitan plans seem to converge in terms of their general themes, they cannot be ultimately “typified” in view of ad hoc variations related to their institutional contexts, instrumental contents and planning processes.     

Statecraft,Scalecraft and Urban Planning: A Comparative Study of Birmingham,UK, and Brisbane,Australia

Recent discussions on state rescaling have pointed towards the need for a greater focus on how and why state activity may change over time in order to generate insights into the provenance, trajectories and outcomes of rescaling in different global regions and national state spaces. Consequently, this paper explores the dialectical and recursive relationship between the concepts of “statecraft” and “scalecraft” to explore the evolving sites, objects and mechanisms for urban planning within two key urban centres in different parts of the world—Birmingham, UK, and Brisbane, Australia. It is illustrated how a range of actors—from the national to the local level—have sought to craft and reshape the strategies and structures for urban planning according to different imperatives. In turn, the implications for a tighter specifying of the process of state rescaling are considered, as well as the subsequent nature of urban planning arrangements.