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The city as stage for social upheaval
Focal point From the western European city to megacities in Asia and Africa, the articles gathered here demonstrate how one principle more than any other asserts itself in the contemporary urban social space. That principle – privatization – is geared towards the concentration of wealth and assets on an increasingly global scale. It is the attempt to naturalize this principle that these articles resist. [ more ]
Complicit utopias: US Cold War planning
New towns on the Cold War frontier
How modern urban planning was exported as an instrument in the battle for the developing world
Complicit utopias The New Towns designed by Constantinos Doxiadis were supposed to inculcate democracy in the Developing World. Today, these urban neighbourhoods have become something quite different to what the architect anticipated: Baghdad's Sadr City being a striking example. [German version added] [ more ]
Shopping town USA
Victor Gruen, the Cold War, and the shopping mall
Complicit utopias Victor Gruen's "shopping towns" were supposed to strengthen civic life and alleviate women's lives. But within a decade they had become the architectural expression of the policy of gender segregation underlying the US postwar consumer utopia. [Lithuanian version added] [ more ]
Space and class: Regenerating the Western city
Fish 'n' freedom fries
On regeneration and other London Olympic myths
Regeneration In July 2006, London rejoiced at winning the bid to host the Olympic Games in 2012. But who is really doing the rejoicing? Urban planners, certainly, who have been handed carte blanche to carry through a programme of reconstruction beyond their wildest dreams. [ more ]
The creativity fix
Space and class In Richard Florida's "creative city", the creative class dissolves the classical division between the productive bourgeoisie and the bohemian. But creativity strategies have been crafted to co-exist with urban socio-economic problems, not to solve them. [ more ]
Marseille: Upgrades and degradation
Space and class Gentrification has charmed its way into European cities for the past 35 years and more, promising rehabilitation of buildings and cityscapes, new cultural venues, shops and restaurants, and of course big profits for developers. But what happened to the real citizens? [ more ]
November nights 2005: The geography of violence
A round table discussion
Space and class Can the riots in the French suburbs be understood as an attempt to force solidarity from the middle classes? On the causes and effects of French suburban unrest. [ more ]
Drowning by numbers
The non-reproduction of New Orleans
regeneration After the actual hurricane that hit New Orleans in late August 2005 came the second hurricane of neo-liberal looting. The vacuum left by the evacuation of the working-class population and the storm’s destruction of infrastructure produced the dream conditions for economic "restructuring". [ more ]
Simulated cities, sedated living
The shopping mall as paradigmatic site of lifestyle capitalism
City branding If the imperative of consumer capitalism is "lead us into temptation", then the shopping mall is its cathedral. Increasingly, city centres – or "brand zones" – are adopting the mall aesthetic. [Lithuanian version added] [ more ]
Second World cities: Ownership, expropriation, survival
Billboard heaven
gallery Sofia is a city where you can put up anything, anytime, anywhere, as long as you can pay... Luchezar Boyadjiev takes the logic of the neo-capitalist city to its visual conclusion. [ more ]
Sofia, fluid city
ownership New social inequalities brought by the transition to a free-market economy are taking shape in the traditionally privileged Sofia. In a privatized city, affluence levels are all too easily read in the urban fabric. But appropriations at the neighbourhood level are mere irritations compared to larger incursions into the city space. [ more ]
Shanghai privatized
Real estate speculations in Shanghai
expropriation Shanghai, China’s first global metropolis, is at the vanguard of social and economic transformation. But this hybrid of communism and capitalism has a major problem: it is demolishing districts in its rush skywards, displacing 2.5 million citizens in the process since 1990. The economic freedoms of the middle classes, who remain subservient to the political leadership, are feeding a culture of isolated individualism. [ more ]
Whoever has a house, survives
Life for migrants to Istanbul's suburbs
survival Gecekondu, homes built semi-legally on public land, first appeared on the outskirts of Turkish cities in the 1950s. Originally, residents were granted ownership of their property. Now, around half pay rent. All the while, gecekondu districts continue to aggregate on the edges of Turkey's cities. [ more ]
Megacities: Globalization's perfect storm
The city of Kinshasa as verbal architecture
Megacities Kinshasa, with its nine million inhabitants the second largest city in sub-Saharan Africa, epitomizes contemporary urban chaos. Given that Kinshasa's infrastructure is either non-existent or doomed to disappear, how can one grasp what holds the city together? [ more ]
Imminent ruin and desperate remedy
Calcutta and its fragments
Megacities Calcutta's longstanding communist government is ingratiating the city to Western investors. By evicting squatters and street vendors from public spaces in the name of sanitation and Western norms, it is robbing Calcutta of its vital tradition of urban commons. [ more ]
The abolition of poverty
Report from Bombay
Megacities Whoever serves in Bombay's city administration and uses the word "slum" simultaneously means "encroachment". The laager mentality of Bombay's rich has led to a social apartheid where slums are cleared to make way – quite literally – for golf courses. [ more ]
Strategies
Entrepreneurial urban politics and urban social movements in Los Angeles
The struggle for urban farmland in South Central
Strategies While ostensibly dealing with the local consequences of wider structural transformation, so-called "entrepreneurial urban policy" plays a major role in reproducing the conditions it seeks to redress. The community garden campaign in South Central L.A. is a local movement that resists the vested interests behind local planning. [ more ]
Hernando de Soto and the mystification of capital
Strategies Hernando de Soto argues that global poverty could be relieved by giving the poor official ownership of their property. But this argument is more likely to be used to defend the sacred right of private ownership. [ more ]
From class struggle to place struggle
The local projects of Alberto Magnaghi and the urban renovation of Bernardo Secchi
Strategies The term "place struggle" serves to highlight the fact that, in post-industrial societies, conflicts are more and more related to the recovery of democratic space and polities. In a world where global technical flows devour conventional urban space, globalization must be tackled "bottom up". Magnaghi's and Secchi's Italian experiments anticipate this need. [ more ]
More focal points
Olympic indifference
The Beijing Olympics 2008 are unusual insofar as not one country has boycotted them. This, despite the fact that the political dimension of the Games has seldom been more controversial. Are we seeing a new kind of "Olympic indifference"? With this in mind, Eurozine compiles articles on sport, politics, and protest. [ more ]
Shared space, divided society
Migration is part of modern society, meaning more and more people of different ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds live together in Europe. The multitude of perspectives and experiences represents an enormous resource, but as cultural conflicts inherent in today's urban societies become visible, doubts are also raised about the value of diversity. [ more ]
1968: Beyond soixante-huite
Forty years on, the differences between the 1968 uprisings in western and eastern Europe move into ever sharper focus. "In retrospect, the great event of '68 in Europe was not Paris, but Prague. But we were unable to see this at the time." Including articles on '68 in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, France and West Germany. [ more ]
Illiberal Europe?
Parliament or the soapbox? Populist politics are enjoying renewed success in Europe, above all in the former socialist countries. Ivan Krastev, G.M.Tamás, Ralf Dahrendorf, Jacques Rupnik and others investigate the rise of "democratic illiberalism". [ more ]
Cultural citizenship
The concept of cultural citizenship responds to the multicultural context of contemporary societies, in which the concern with equality is increasingly being complemented with a concern with difference. Contributors include Gerard Delanty, Axel Honneth, Rainer Bauböck, Ivaylo Ditchev, Charles Taylor, Rada Ivekovic, António Sousa Ribeiro. [ more ]
Decentring Europe
Any reinvention of the concept of Europe that takes into account the complexities inherent in Europe's place in a globalized world must contain a critique of Eurocentrism. Learning from the South, i.e. absorbing the full critical impact of alternative approaches may be a key element in the rethinking – and unthinking – of "Europe".
[ more ]
The future of war
Are wars that are fought between nations a thing of the past, and are the future challenges more a case of ethnic strife, break-up of failed states, secession and civil wars? In a special focal point, Eurozine analyzes the changing face of warfare in the twenty-first century, in which terrorism and new security threats have profoundly transformed the way wars are conducted. [ more ]
Big Brother goes global
Post 9/11, governments are increasingly tailoring "international standards" to ratify domestic policies that intrude on civil liberties. Welcome to the phenomenon of "policy laundering". [ more ]
Changing Europe
As political Europe turns 50, the questions about its future are as open as ever. A special focus featuring some of Eurozine's most outstanding contributions on the European project: From analyses of the current crisis to a hilarious parody of Brussels' literary ambitions. [ more ]
Post-secular Europe?
Is religion a public or a private matter? Can there be such a thing as a European Islam? If so, what characterizes it? What role can religion – or religions – play when it comes to the emergence of a European solidarity? [ more ]
European histories: Towards a grand narrative?
In order for there to be solidarity within the enlarged EU, it will be necessary to develop a broader historical consciousness that includes both western and eastern experiences. [ more ]
Europe talks to Europe: Towards a European public sphere?
The European integration project has made the discussion about transnational spaces for cultural and political debate acute. Can there at all be a common Europe without a pan-European public sphere? [ more ]
Politics of border making and (cross-)border identities
Have borders become irrelevant with the project of a united Europe? No, just the opposite. On the dilemmas of border building and cross-border cooperation in the EU and its neighbourhood. [ more ]
Documenta 12 magazines
Eurozine is participating in the Documenta 12 magazines project, which links over 90 print and on-line periodicals worldwide. Read Eurozine's contributions to the documenta leitmotifs "Modernity" and "Bare Life" here.[ more ]
Freedom of speech and the Danish cartoon controversy
Free speech is a fundamental human right and a central tenet of democracy. Or is it? Reactions to the Danish cartoon controversy show that liberals are re-evaluating what the right to free speech entails. [ more ]
Politics of translation
Translation today is as much about the translation of cultural, political, and historical contexts and concepts as it is about language. [ more ]
Conferences
Changing places (What's normal anyway?)
The 20th European Meeting of Cultural Journals
Sibiu, 21-24 October 2007
Under the heading "Changing places (What's normal anyway?)", the Eurozine network conference 2007 in Sibiu, Romania, addressed the challenges facing societies, literature, and the media as the need for change meets the urge for normality. Read the conference texts here. [ more ]
Friend and foe. Shared space, divided society
The 19th European Meeting of Cultural Journals
London, 27-30 October 2006
Speakers at the 19th European Meeting of Cultural Journals opened up the discussion on cultural diversity in two directions: first, as it is experienced in the physical urban space, and second, as it is reflected in the mirror of the media. [ more ]
Neighbourhoods
The 18th European Meeting of Cultural Journals
Istanbul, 4-7 November 2005
Contributions on the notion of neighbourhood and the Turkey-Europe question from a range of intellectual and geographic perspectives. [ more ]