This book details the current neoliberal restructuring of cities and its impact on the rise and spread of resistance and uprisings in different cities throughout the world. Through close ethnographic study the authors illuminate the strategies adopted for everyday life that have evolved in response to the neoliberal managing of cities, by which the city is shaped by market forces rather than by the needs of its inhabitants. In the light of many urban movements, uprisings and forms of resistance observed in such diverse countries as Brazil, Turkey, the USA, Greece and Spain since the Arab uprising of 2011, this collection makes an original contribution to urban sociology and social geography by developing a spatial approach to understanding how the city shapes identities and perceptions of (in)justice. This innovative volume will be of interest to readers across the social sciences.

This book analyses the key livelihood and governance challenges that the urban poor experience while navigating public spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using data collected through extensive fieldwork in Bangladesh, the book contributes to the emerging scholarship of resilient cities, gendered space, spatial justice, and poverty in cities of the Global South. The book assesses the everyday politics of survival for the urban poor; how the poor negotiate different levels of formal and informal modes of power and governance; and the dynamics of gender. It explores how tenuous counter-spaces are created when these factors combine to provide a valuable framework for work in other urban contexts in the Global South beyond Bangladesh. Using cross-disciplinary perspectives, this book investigates the issues of human development, urban governance, urban planning and the gendered nature of urban space to outline how these issues enable or constrain poor people’s livelihood practices and their rights to be in the city. Exploring debates surrounding placemaking and inclusive cities and their connection to poor people’s livelihoods, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of Sociology, Development Studies, Planning, Geography and Anthropology.

It is not possible to be alive today in the United States without feeling the influence of the political climate on the spaces where people live, work, and form communities. Public Space/Contested Space illustrates the ways in which creative interventions in public space have constituted a significant dimension of contemporary political action, and how this space can both reflect and spur economic and cultural change. Drawing insight from a range of disciplines and fields, the essays in this volume assess the effectiveness of protest movements that deploy bodies in urban space, and social projects that build communities while also exposing inequalities and presenting new political narratives. With sections exploring the built environment, artists, and activists and public space, the book brings together the diverse voices to reveal the complexities and politicization of public space within the United States. Public Space/Contested Space provides a significant contribution to an understudied dimension of contemporary political action and will be a resource to students of urban studies and planning, architecture, sociology, art history, and human geography.

European cities: Modernity, race and colonialism is a multidisciplinary collection of scholarly studies which rethink European urban modernity from a race-conscious perspective, being aware of (post-)colonial entanglements. The twelve original contributions empirically focus on such various cities as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Cottbus, Genoa, Hamburg, Madrid, Mitrovica, Naples, Paris, Sheffield, and Thessaloniki, engaging multiple combinations of global urban studies, from various historical perspectives, with postcolonial, decolonial and critical race studies. Primarily inspired by the notion of Provincializing Europe (Dipesh Chakrabarty) the collection interrogates dominant, Eurocentric theories, representations and models of European cities across the East-West divide, offering the reader alternative perspectives to understand and imagine urban life and politics. With its focus on Europe, this book ultimately contributes to decades of rigorous critical race scholarship on varied global urban regions. European cities is a vital reading for anyone interested in the complex interactions between colonial legacies and constructions of 'modernity', in view of catering to social change and urban justice.

Focusing on youth activism for greater equality, liberty and mutual care - radical democracy - this timely collection explores the movement’s impacts on community organisations and workers. Essays from the Global North and Global South cover the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental activism and the struggles of refugees.

This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science. This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others.

This book explores the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia through a comparison of the host cities of Ekaterinburg and Volgograd - two major but peripheral cities little discussed outside of Russia. It unpacks the World Cup at multiple scales of analysis, from global political economic processes, Russian national state spatial strategies, uneven municipal developments, the creation and distribution of soft power narratives to the domestic audience, and varieties of adoption or refusal of those narratives among host city residents. In so doing, the book offers a light and revisable framework for understanding mega-events regardless of national context. Sven Daniel Wolfe is junior lecturer at the University of Lausanne. He studies mega-events, urban development, and the cultures of protest and resistance.