Increasingly, urban actors invoke human rights to address inequalities, combat privatisation, and underline common aspirations, or to protect vested (private) interests. The potential and the pitfalls of these processes are conditioned by the urban, and deeply political. These urban politics of human rights are at the heart of this book. An international line-up of contributors with long-term engagement in this field shed light on these politics in cities on four continents and eight cities, presenting a wealth of empirical detail and disciplinary theoreticalisation perspectives. They analyse the ‘city society’, the urban actors involved, and the mechanisms of human rights mobilisation. In doing so, they show the commonalities in rights engagement in today’s globalised and often deeply unequal cities characterised by urban law, private capital but also communities that rally around concepts as the ‘right to the city’. Most importantly, the chapters highlight the conditions under which this mobilisation truly contributes to social justice, be it concerning the simple right to presence, cultural rights, accessible housing or – in times of COVID – health care. Urban Politics of Human Rights provides indispensable reading for anyone with a practical or theoretical interest in the complex, deeply political, and at times also truly promising interrelationship between human rights and the urban. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Provides theoretical and practical insights into how the new phenomenon of human rights cities contributes to global urban justice.

Revealing how architects can use human rights as powerful tools for better, fairer urban planning - to create livable, sustainable cities of the future.

"Activists use space to advance political causes, a dynamic this book explores through stories of quotidian street life in Amsterdam. Residents there saw many changes in the late 20th and early 21st century. The rise of neoliberal governance, creative class economies, and quality-of-life boosterism brought new concerns about social justice, neighborhood character, and environmental responsibility"--

The Oxford Handbook of Urban Politics is an authoritative volume on an established subject in political science and the academy more generally: urban politics and urban studies. The editors are all recognized experts, and are well connected to the leading scholars in urban politics. The handbook covers the major themes that animate the subfield: the politics of space and place; power and governance; urban policy; urban social organization; citizenship and democratic governance; representation and institutions; approaches and methodology; and the future of urban politics. Given the caliber of the editors and proposed contributors, the volume sets the intellectual agenda for years to come.

The confluence of global climate change, growing levels of energy consumption and rapid urbanization has led the international policy community to regard urban responses to climate change as ‘an urgent agenda’ (World Bank 2010). The contribution of cities to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions coupled with concerns about the vulnerability of urban places and communities to the impacts of climate change have led to a relatively recent and rapidly proliferating interest amongst both academic and policy communities in how cities might be able to respond to mitigation and adaptation. Attention has focused on the potential for municipal authorities to develop policy and plans that can address these twin issues, and the challenges of capacity, resource and politics that have been encountered. While this literature has captured some of the essential means through which the urban response to climate change is being forged, is that it has failed to take account of the multiple sites and spaces of climate change response that are emerging in cities ‘off-plan’. An Urban Politics of Climate Change provides the first account of urban responses to climate change that moves beyond the boundary of municipal institutions to critically examine the governing of climate change in the city as a matter of both public and private authority, and to engage with the ways in which this is bound up with the politics and practices of urban infrastructure. The book draws on cases from multiple cities in both developed and emerging economies to providing new insight into the potential and limitations of urban responses to climate change, as well as new conceptual direction for our understanding of the politics of environmental governance.

What really happened when citizens were asked to participate in their community’s poverty programs? In this revealing new book, the authors provide an answer to this question through a systematic empirical analysis of a single public policy issue—citizen participation in the Community Action Program of the Johnson Administration’s “War on Poverty.” Beginning with a brief case study description and analysis of the politics of community action in each of America’s five largest cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia—the authors move on to a fascinating examination of race and authority structures in our urban life. In a series of lively chapters, Professors Greenstone and Peterson show how the coalitions that formed around the community action question developed not out of electoral or organizational interests alone, but were strongly influenced by our conceptions of the nature of authority in America. They discuss the factors that affected the development of the action program and they note that democratic elections of low-income representatives, however much preferred by democratic reformers, were an ineffective way of representing the interests of the poor. The book stresses the way in which both machine and reform structures affected the ability of minority groups to organize effectively and to form alliances in urban politics. It considers the wide-ranging critiques made of the Community Action Program by conservative, liberal, and radical analysts and finds that all of them fail to appreciate the significance and intensity of the racial cleavage in American politics.

While most of the existing literature on community gardens and urban agriculture share a tendency towards either an advocacy view or a rather dismissive approach on the grounds of the co-optation of food growing, self-help and voluntarism to the neoliberal agenda, this collection investigates and reflects on the complex and sometimes contradictory nature of these initiatives. It questions to what extent they address social inequality and injustice and interrogates them as forms of political agency that contest, transform and re-signify ‘the urban’. Claims for land access, the right to food, the social benefits of city greening/community conviviality, and insurgent forms of planning, are multiplying within policy, advocacy and academic literature; and are becoming increasingly manifested through the practice of urban gardening. These claims are symptomatic of the way issues of social reproduction intersect with the environment, as well as the fact that urban planning and the production of space remains a crucial point of an ever-evolving debate on equity and justice in the city. Amid a mushrooming over positive literature, this book explores the initiatives of urban gardening critically rather than apologetically. The contributors acknowledge that these initiatives are happening within neoliberal environments, which promote –among other things - urban competition, the dismantling of the welfare state, the erasure of public space and ongoing austerity. These initiatives, thus, can either be manifestation of new forms of solidarity, political agency and citizenship or new tools for enclosure, inequality and exclusion. In designing this book, the progressive stance of these initiatives has therefore been taken as a research question, rather than as an assumption. The result is a collection of chapters that explore potentials and limitations of political gardening as a practice to envision and implement a more sustainable and just city.

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Seeing urban politics from the perspective of those who reside in slums offers an important dimension to the study of urbanism in the global South. Many people living in sub-standard conditions do not have their rights as urban citizens recognised and realise that they cannot rely on formal democratic channels or governance structures. Through in-depth case studies and comparative research, The Politics of Slums in the Global South: Urban Informality in Brazil, India, South Africa and Peru integrates conceptual discussions on urban political dynamics with empirical material from research undertaken in Rio de Janeiro, Delhi, Chennai, Cape Town, Durban and Lima. The chapters engage with the relevant literature and present empirical material on urban governance and cities in the South, housing policy for the urban poor, the politics of knowledge and social mobilisation. Recent theories on urban informality and subaltern urbanism are explored, and the issue of popular participation in public interventions is critically assessed. The book is aimed at a scholarly readership of postgraduate students and researchers in development studies, urban geography, political science, urban sociology and political geography. It is also of great value to urban decision-makers and practitioners.