Cities of Extremes |
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| Authors: | Asef Bayat Kees Biekart |
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| Institution: | 1. Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, holds the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research areas range from social movements and non‐movements, religion, politics, everyday life, Islam and the modern world, to urban space and politics and international development. His books include Street Politics: Poor People's Movements in Iran (Columbia University Press, 1997), Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post‐Islamist Turn (Stanford University Press, 2007), and most recently Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2009).;2. is a Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology at the Institute of Social Studies (PO Box 29776, 2502 LT The Hague, The Netherlands). His research interests include NGOs, social movements, civil society, citizenship and foreign aid, in particular in relation to Latin America. He recently published with Alan Fowler a collection of essays on Civic Driven Change. |
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| Abstract: | Modern cities have always been the locus of both inequality and opportunity. However, neoliberal policies pursued since the 1980s have intensified urban disparities. Cities are increasingly shaped more by the logic of the market than the needs of their inhabitants. This article, which introduces a collection of papers on the topic, examines the implications of the neoliberal turn for the ‘right to the city’ as the fundamental tenet of urban citizenship. While evidence suggests a formidable challenge from market forces to the ‘right to the city’, the authors argue that the neoliberal city remains a highly contested urbanity in which poor inhabitants continue to struggle for citizenship in highly diverse ways. The challenge for scholarship is to discover and document those intricate modes of claim‐making. |
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