This book tells the story of Metropoliz, a vacant salami factory located in the Eastern periphery of Rome (Italy) that was squatted in 2009 by homeless households with the cooperation of the Housing Rights Movement Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, and progressively reconverted into the house and museum spaces that form the Città Meticcia (the mestizo city). Through a vivid activist-ethnographic account, Margherita Grazioli suggests that Metropoliz exemplifies a practice of grassroots urban regeneration that speaks to the conflicted reconfiguration of real estate urban regimes in a post-crisis, post-neoliberal scenario. Using the contentious reappropriation of housing as a point of departure for claiming manifold rights, Metropoliz represents an alternative model of urbanity and habitation that will inspire contemporary urban social movements concerned with the demand of the ‘right to the city’, as well as those concerned with the ontology of the urban commons.

Emphasising the social, critical and situated dimensions of the urban, this comprehensive Research Handbook presents a unique collection of theoretical and empirical perspectives on urban sociology. Bringing together expert contributors from across the world, it provides a rich overview and research agenda for contemporary urban sociological scholarship.

Migrants squats are an essential part of the ‘corridors of solidarity’ that are being created throughout Europe, where grassroots social movements engaged in anti-racist, anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics coalesce with migrants in devising non-institutional responses to the violence of border regimes. This book focuses on migrants’ self-organised housing strategies in Europe and the collective squatting of buildings and land. In these spaces contentious politics and everyday social reproduction uproot racist and xenophobic regimes. The struggles emerging in these spaces disrupt host-guest relations, which often perpetuate state-imposed hierarchies and humanitarian disciplining technologies. The solidarities and collaborations between undocumented and documented activists in these radical spaces enable possibilities for inhabitance beyond, against and within citizenship. These do not only reverse forms of exclusion and repression, but produce ungovernable resources, alliances and subjectivities that prefigure more livable spaces for all. The contributions to this book address these struggles as forms of commoning, as they constitute autonomous socio-political infrastructures and networks of solidarity beyond and against the state and humanitarian provision. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

Successive waves of global protest since 1999 have encouraged leading contemporary political theorists to argue that politics has fundamentally changed in the last twenty years, with a new type of politics gaining momentum over elite, representative institutions. The new politics is frequently described as radical, but what does radicalism mean for the conduct of politics? Capturing the innovative practices of contemporary radicals, Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics brings together leading academics and campaigners to answer these questions and explore radicalism’s meaning to their practice. In the thirty-five chapters written for this collection, they collectively develop a picture of radicalism by investigating the intersections of activism and contemporary political theory. Across their experiences, the authors articulate radicalism’s critical politics and discuss how diverse movements support and sustain each other. Together, they provide a wide-ranging account of the tensions, overlaps and promise of radical politics, while utilising scholarly literatures on grassroots populism to present a novel analysis of the relationship between radicalism and populism. Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics serves as a key reference for students and scholars interested in the politics and ideas of contemporary activist movements.

Includes a 2014 Postscript addressing Occupy Wall Street and other developments. Efforts to secure the American city have life-or-death implications, yet demands for heightened surveillance and security throw into sharp relief timeless questions about the nature of public space, how it is to be used, and under what conditions. Blending historical and geographical analysis, this book examines the vital relationship between struggles over public space and movements for social justice in the United States. Don Mitchell explores how political dissent gains meaning and momentum--and is regulated and policed--in the real, physical spaces of the city. A series of linked cases provides in-depth analyses of early twentieth-century labor demonstrations, the Free Speech Movement and the history of People's Park in Berkeley, contemporary anti-abortion protests, and efforts to remove homeless people from urban streets.

'Resilience' has become one of the first fully fledged academic and political buzzwords of the 21st century. Within this context, Geoffrey DeVerteuil proposes a more critically engaged and conceptually robust version, applying it to the conspicuous but now residual clusters of inner-city voluntary sector organisations deemed ‘service hubs’. The process of resilience is compared across ten service hubs in three complex but different global inner-city regions – London, Los Angeles and Sydney – in response to the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. DeVerteuil shows that resilience can be about holding on to previous gains but also about holding out for transformation. The book is the first to move beyond theoretical works on ‘resilience’ and offers a combined conceptual and empirical approach that will interest urban geographers, social planners and researchers in the voluntary sector.