Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores different emergent spaces where diverse urbanites spontaneously negotiate, make and remake urban spaces, create opportunities, produce social change, challenge urban life, culture, and politics, or simply ask for their right to the city. The focus of this book is on spaces and contexts where change is seeded, regardless of whether it was planned and whether it was or will be successful in the end. Contributors analyze the seeds of change at their very inception in diverse cultural contexts across four continents. How do small groups of ordinary and often also disenfranchised people design, suggest and implement ideas of change? How do they use and remake small urban spaces to better suit their purposes, voice claims to the city, create opportunities, and design better urban lives and futures? The emphasis of this volume is not on the nature of activities and change, but on the minute processes of initiating change.
Table of ContentsIntroduction
I. MIGRANTS, PLACE-MAKING, AND CLAIMS TO THE CITY
Chapter 1. Peripheral Citizenship: Immigration and City-Making in Santiago, Chile
Chapter 2. Spaces of Social Reproduction and Emergent Change in Small Town America
Chapter 3. Practice, Perception, and the Plaza: Situating Migration in Santiago, Chile
Chapter 4. The Free Trade Zone and the Ethnic Restaurant: South Asian Emergent Space in a Chilean City of Labor Migrants
II. RELIGION, URBAN INNOVATION, AND URBAN SPIRITUAL GEOGRPAHIES
Chapter 5. “God Loves Taxi Drivers”: Christian Publics and Emergent Spaces in Shanghai, China
Chapter 6. The Good Tree Institute (GTI): Muslim Self-Making and Place-Making in Metropolitan Phoenix
Chapter 7. Building Community Centers in Living Rooms: Piety Movements, Domestic Space, and Women in Islamabad, Pakistan
III. POPULAR CULTURE, LIFESTYLES, SOCIAL ACTIVISM, AND INFRASTRUCTURES
Chapter 8. $5 Gets you Soup, Bread and a Vote: Microgranting Dinners for Transforming Detroit
Chapter 9. Belonging through Bohemia: Maintaining Queer Space and Possibility in Teresina, Brazil
Chapter 10. Sustainability, Green Businesses and Alternative Economies in Stuttgart, Germany
Chapter 11. "Punk rock DIY belly feeding”: ephemerality in authentic space-making in Barcelona and Vancouver
Chapter 12. You Can’t Fight City Hall? Philadelphia’s Advocates for the Homeless and Community Activists Engage in the Battle of Love Park
Chapter 13. Never-ending Beginnings: Spaces of Infrastructural Labor in Cape Town’s Informal Settlements
Conclusion
