Abstract
The publication of this book is timely: the right to the city has now been extensively studied in the developed world. But at the same time, the fast pace of urbanisation in the Global South has raised some concern about the dominance of theories from the Global North, leading to an appeal for ‘provincialising global urbanism’. Against this background, this book examines the right to the city in the fast-growing South. The word ‘locating’ precisely reflects the effort to contextualise a thematic issue in the reality of the Global South. This effort has led to fruitful results: the book is not an isolated study of social inequality and conflict in these countries, nor is it merely a transfer of the concept from the well-established research community to new places. Rather, the book explores how similar trends of neoliberalism have developed at a global scale with impacts on social divisions in new places, and how the perspective of the right to the city can be fruitfully used to understand social conflicts, which may in turn shape their future.
After the introduction, the book is divided into three Parts. Part I examines the socio-spatial transformation of cities in the Global South under the pressure of neoliberal policies. Among these changes, informal settlement is a classical topic and is now examined in the neoliberal era. The policy of erasure through neglect, displacement and criminalisation is re-examined with a perspective of urban theory, namely neoliberalism and the right to the city. This re-reading of informal settlement shows a clear recognition of the political nature of the ‘housing question’ in slums ‘that goes beyond mere improvements of market channels to address the fundamental questions of entitlement’ (p. 37). Similarly, a critical reflection on ‘cities without slums’ in Morocco suggests that the ‘commitment to eradicate all slums in its cities is a salient example of this global shift in neoliberal governmentality’ (p. 41). Citizen participation and good governance are not sufficient, and quite often serve top-down neoliberal rationalities. The perspective of the right to the city is revolutionary because it requires a fundamental critique of current practices, which prioritise the market over the lives of the poor. The study of urban renewal in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, reveals similar trends elsewhere, in which responsibility has been shifted from government to civil society, and government intervention is replaced by the free market. The case of a master-planned eco-city in China reveals how green and ecological values have led to dispossession of villagers and the failure of displaced villagers to find work in nearby high-tech industrial districts, with massive disenfranchisement occurring as a result.
Part II describes the transformation of governance in the Global South under strategies familiar to the Western world, which attempts to remove the southern appearance of these cities. These strategies include urban mega-projects in China and India, the Kolkata environmental improvement project illustrating environmentalism to pursue spatial quality, public space in Bogota, renewal programmes in Mexico City and resistance to them, segregation in Durban and gentrification in Berlin. While these represent similar global urban themes, there are contextual differences between distinct locations in the Global South, let alone the difference from the Western experience. This part includes a set of coherent and related cases, illustrating the change of mode of governance and development approaches ranging from East Asia to South Asia, Latin America and Africa. These particular visions of cosmopolitan urbanism are articulated differently, but all are slanted toward the separation of middle-income groups and the urban poor.
Part III then describes conflicts and contests in the urban arena resulting from the transformation of neoliberal urban governance. This part begins with a description of social participation in local-level urban planning in Santiago, and then moves on to the analysis of contentious urban middle classes in Argentina, Brazil and Turkey who demand the ‘right kind of the city’. But against the background of the ‘right to the city’, it is rightly asked, ‘How is this kind of relatively lavish livability legitimized?’ (p. 255). This is a particularly acute question in the deeply unequal landscape of the Global South. In the cases, we see the fractious citizenships that exert different demands. In a more dramatic form, the final case is about civil society mobilisation and changing public space in Cairo. It shows the move between real and virtual worlds, which are developing possibilities for opposition to an authoritarian governance structure. The chapters in this part clearly demonstrate the revolutionary nature of the notion of the right to the city, and the conflicts act to counter neoliberal governance and bring politics back into the analysis of the Global South.
Finally, the concluding chapter by Martin Murray identifies some common themes for cities in the Global South, which may include slum redevelopment, fast construction of new cities or so-called ‘instant urbanism’, the spread of spectacular architecture, infrastructure enclaves in association with ‘splintering urbanism’, new modes of urban governance, social justice and the change of public space. All these themes are not necessarily unique to the Global South. For example, privatised public space and the militarisation of urban space are discussed by Mike Davis for Los Angeles, and revanchist urbanism is developed by Neil Smith for New York. But there are different manifestations of similar neoliberalism governance in the public spaces of the Global South – such as the policy against mushrooming street economies (small street vendors).
While there is a rising appeal for understanding the contexts of global urbanism, this book represents a major concrete step towards this aim, by taking a widely popularised core concept of urban theory and paying extra attention to distinct locations in the Global South. All the cases are examined analytically with a theoretical concern but are solidly grounded in these places in the South. The authors also provide extensive references to the latest research in the field, which allows the reader to follow up these in-depth studies. The chapters together enrich our understanding of the right to the city and open up wide visions of a better urban future. The book is well illustrated and very readable. Readers of both urban studies and development studies may be interested in this book, because it engages with a major topic of urban studies and at the same time has a wide geographical coverage. For the former, the reader may wish to extend his or her understanding of how the concept is framed in different places; for the latter, it is inspiring to re-read familiar topics such as informal settlements with a much more critical and stronger theoretical perspective. So a wide audience for this book is foreseeable.