Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book examines the political and economic trajectories of cities following the 2008 financial crisis. The authors claim that in this era--which they dub "late neoliberalism"--urban spaces, institutions, subjectivities, and organizational forms are undergoing processes of radical transformation and recomposition. The volume deftly argues that the urban political horizon of late neoliberalism is ambivalent; marked by many progressive mobilizations for equality and justice, but also by regressive forces of austerity, exploitation, and domination.
Synopsis
1. Introduction: Locating the Political in Late Neoliberalism
Part I: Theorizing the Urban Political
2. Presupposing Democracy: Placing Politics in the Urban
3. Desiring the Common in the Post-crisis Metropolis: Insurgencies, Contradictions, Appropriations
4. The Globalized City as a Locus of the Political: Logistical Urbanization, Genealogical Insights, Contemporary Aporias
Part II: Materializing the Urban Political
5. Where is the 'Organisation' in the Urban Political?
6, Neoliberalizing Infrastructure and its Discontents: The Bus Rapid Transit Project in Dar es Salaam
7. Infrastructure, 'Seeing Sanitation' and the Urban Political in an era of Late Neoliberalism
Part III: Governing the Urban Political
8. The 'Cooperative' or 'Cop-out' Council? Urban Politics at a time of Austerity Local
ism in London
9. The Politics of Consultation in Urban Development and its Encounters with Local Administration
10. Precarity, Surplus, and the Urban Political: Shack Life in South Africa
Part IV: Re-politicizing the Urban Political
11. Voice or Noise? Spaces of Appearance and Political Subjectivity in the London Riots 2011
12. The Southern Urban Political in Transcalar Perspective: A View from the Squatter Movements of Belo Horizonte
13. Counter Publics and Counter Spaces