URBAN AND REGIONAL ECONOMICS

Edward W. Soja.  Seeking Spatial Justice.  Minneapolis  University of Minnesota Press, 2010.  xviii + 256 pp.  $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8166-6667-6; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8166-6668-3. Reviewed by Naomi Millner (University of Bristol) Published on H-HistGeog (August, 2010) Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew Circuitously Seeking Spatial Justice Across the last thirty years, the case for a _spatial_ dimension of inequality has rallied social scientists across the disciplines; a dimension, it is held, long neglected by theorists of uneven social development. One yield of this "spatial turn" has been a remodeled Marxist analytic, with a constitutive role for spatial, as well as sociohistorical, processes. Spatial sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre is widely associated with popularizing a vocabulary for this "production of space," and for the contentious praxis that targets its progressive transformation, most notably in his seminal work _Le Production de l'Espace _(1974). This vocabulary steadily infiltrated critical lexicons throughout the 1970s and 1980s, adding nuance to emergent studies of urban agglomeration and their unequal effects. But it was, properly speaking, the last decade of the twentieth century in which a literature of critical urban studies truly burgeoned. The work of geographers and urban theorists, such as Neil Brenner, Mustafa Dikeç, and Mark Purcell, marked the rise of a "heterodox" Marxism, with its hallmark attention to the new scales and multiple centers of contemporary capitalism. Situating himself firmly within this legacy, in _Seeking Spatial Justice_, Edward W. Soja sets out to conduct a "wide-ranging exploration of spatial justice as a theoretical concept," with which he hopes to sharpen the objects of progressive research agendas--and in consequence, to catalyze more participatory forms of social activism, and a spatially attuned democratic politics (p. 1). Soja's recapitulation of the spatial

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city's Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city's poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action.In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor-community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice.Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city. « Menos

Over the past few decades, the governance of nature has taken its most radical turn. The most influential change in economic and social regulation has seen a dramatic reprise of liberal faith in less regulated markets and minimalist states, underpinned by advocacy for extending exclusive property rights to nearly everything imaginable. This complex turn, with its countless yet uncharted implications for environmental quality and governance, is captured by the contentious concept of neoliberalism. Today, neoliberalism provides the context and direction for how humans affect and interact with the non-human world and with one another. But what does this mean for nature? This volume brings together specific case studies that span more than two decades of experience and evidence linking neoliberalism with concrete environmental changes, politics, and outcomes in diverse, international contexts. It evaluates specific political ecologies and dynamics, and the implications of particular neoliberal reformsand enforcements, while collectively affording new contributors and readers the possibility of thinking comparatively across sectors and geographic contexts. Such specificity and comparative potential serves important analytical functions because it allows the authors and editors to craft stronger, more credible answers to the central questions of what neoliberalism is and what it entails in specific sorts of circumstances.

This is the first volume to analyse systematically the role of neoliberalism in contemporary processes of urban restructuring.

This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary volume brings together diverse analyses of state space in historical and contemporary capitalism.

In this synthetic, interdisciplinary work, Neil Brenner develops a new interpretation of the transformation of statehood under contemporary globalizing capitalism. Whereas most analysts of the emergent, post-Westphalian world order have focused on supranational and national institutional realignments, New State Spaces shows that strategic subnational spaces, such as cities and city-regions, represent essential arenas in which states are being transformed. Brenner traces the transformation of urban governance in western Europe during the last four decades and, on this basis, argues that inherited geographies of state power are being fundamentally rescaled. Through a combination of theory construction, historical analysis and cross-national case studies of urban policy change, New State Spaces provides an innovative analysis of the new formations of state power that are currently emerging.

"Radical Democracy" addresses the loss of faith in conventional party politics, and argues for new ways of thinking about diversity, liberty, and civic responsibility. Long debated in political circles, "radical democracy" as discussed here becomes interdisciplinary. The cultural and social theorists in "Radical Democracy" broaden the discussion beyond the conventional and conservative rhetoric by investigating the applicability of radical democracy in the United States. Issues debated include whether democracy is primarily a form of decision making or an instrument of popular empowerment; whether democracy constitutes an abstract ideal or an achievable goal; and how "radical" a democracy is preferable in a nation like the US. The contributors are some of the most exciting and well-known voices in social and cultural theory today--a diverse group of intellectuals, grassroots activists, and academics involved in identity-based movements. Not surprisingly, they often disagree. What they share is the belief in political possibility and the perception that change is attainable.

Recapturing Democracy is a short yet synoptic introduction to urban democracy in our era of political neoliberalism and economic globalization. Combining an original argument with a number of case studies, Mark Purcell explores the condition of democracy in contemporary Western cities. Whereas many scholars focus on what Purcell calls "procedural democracy" - i.e., electoral politics and access to it - he instead assesses "substantive democracy." By this he means the people's ability to have some say over issues of social justice, material well being, and economic equality. Neoliberalism, which advocates a diminished role for the state and increasing power for mobile capital, has diminished substantive democracy in recent times, he argues. He looks at case studies where this has occurred and at others that show how neoliberalism can be resisted in the name of substantive democracy. Ultimately, he utilizes Henri Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which encompasses substantive as well as procedural democracy for ordinary urban citizens. "If you are tired of being asphyxiated by sanctimonious invocations of 'empowerment' and 'stakeholding, ' then you will enjoy this provocative new study by Mark Purcell. With admirable clarity, he exposes the screaming contradictions between neoliberalism's rhetoric and reality, as well as pointing out the brave (if meager) seeds of authentic democracy in our public life." - Mike Davis, University of California-Irvine "Mark Purcell's illuminating book reveals how neoliberalism is transforming and corrupting urban spaces today. And for this illness he prescribes democracy as cure, both analyzing what democracy can mean today and demonstrating how people are already constructing democratic attitudes and democratizing movements in our cities to combat neoliberalism." - Michael Hardt, Duke University

This highly accessible account of Marxism and the city covers their relationship from the 1850s to the present through biographical chapters on eight towering figures in the Marxist tradition - Marx, Engels, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Manuel Castells, David Harvey, and Marshall Berman. Each chapter combines interesting biographical anecdotes with a readable analysis of each individual's contribution to the evolving Marxist theory of the city. Merrifield highlights the dialectical nature of the modern city in both its industrial and post-industrial phases. Cities are the places where capital organizes itself and inequality is most intense, but also where the potential for progressive change is most real. The interplay between these two forces, he demonstrates, has produced a major corpus of work that both takes stock of the capitalist city and attempts to advance progressive social transformations. Merrifield emphasizes the cultural, aesthetic side of the Marxist urban tradition inparticular. He situates his subject in the streets of the city, showing how the theorists he examines fed off the energy and dialectical tension there. The resulting book is the most engaging and optimistic study of the topic available and will enlighten interested readers at many levels.

Henri Lefebvre has been celebrated as one of the most influential social theorists of the twentieth century. Understanding Henri Lefebvre places Lefebvre in his historical and intellectual context and analyzes the extraordinary range of his work, across politics, philosophy, history, literature and culture. Particular emphasis is given to Lefebvre's trilogy of inspirational thinkers--Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche; his links to contemporaries such as Heidegger, Axelos and the Situationalists; and his critiques of existentialism and structuralism. Analysis of his writings on cites are balanced with those on rural communities, the production of space connected to ideas of time and history, and everyday life linked to the festival and cultural revolution. Understanding Henri Lefebvre offers the most wide-ranging and reliable account of this central theorist available.

In the past fifteen years, Henri Lefebvre?s reputation has catapulted into the stratosphere, and he is now considered an equal to some of the greats of European social theory (Bourdieu, Deleuze, Harvey). In particular, his work has revitalized urban studies, geography and planning via concepts like; the social production of space, the right to the city, everyday life, and global urbanization. Lefebvre?s massive body of work has generated two main schools of thought: one that is political economic, and another that is more culturally oriented and poststructuralist in tone. Space, Difference, and Everyday Life merges these two schools of thought into a unified Lefebvrian approach to contemporary urban issues and the nature of our spatialized social structures.

How we deal with strangers is at once a question of profound ethical significance and of practical and political necessity. In the current revival of interest in the concept of hospitality, the reception of philosophical themes associated with Levinas, Derrida and others is increasingly taking place in a context of worldly demands arising out of new global mobilities and institutionalized practices aimed at controlling them. Much critical work, especially in the social sciences, assumes congruence between 'otherness' or 'estrangement' and the crossing of national borders and other concrete boundaries. But is there more at stake than this? Extending Hospitality brings together authors from philosophy, geography, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and sociology to explore the interface between ethical ideals and worldly demands. Across a range of historical and geographical contexts, this collection engages with the differing ways that people become 'estranged', the spacing and timing of the encounter between guests and hosts, the tensions between institutionalized and 'unconditional' welcoming, the relationship between human finitude and political abjection, and the gendered expectations of hospitality.

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'. Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism. Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over socia

The relationship between space and politics is explored through a study of French urban policy. Drawing upon the political thought of Jacques Rancière, this book proposes a new agenda for analyses of urban policy, and provides the first comprehensive account of French urban policy in English. Essential resource for contextualizing and understanding the revolts occurring in the French 'badland' neighbourhoods in autumn 2005 Challenges overarching generalizations about urban policy and contributes new research data to the wider body of urban policy literature Identifies a strong urban and spatial dimension within the shift towards more nationalistic and authoritarian policy governing French citizenship and immigration

DJoachim Hirsch, The Apparatus of the State, tre Reproduction of Capital and Urban Conflicts 

David Harvey, The Urban Process Under Capitalism - A Frameork for Analysis

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São Paulo: metrópole em trânsito : percursos urbanos e culturais Candido Malta Campos, Lúcia Helena Gama, Vladimir Sacchetta 0 Resenhas Senac, 2004 - 263 páginas São Paulo, cidade imensa que rompeu seus limites urbanos, caracteriza-se pela diversidade e pelos contrastes - sofisticação e precariedade, convivência e solidão, cidadania e vandalismo, solidariedade e descaso, oportunidade e exclusão.

Reinvente seu bairro: caminhos para você participar do planejamento de sua cidade Cândido Malta Campos Filho