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Security and Flexible Governance in Johannesburg and Cape Town: to Rule ornot? |
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by Claire BÉNIT-GBAFFOU and Marianne MORANGE
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| Since the demise of the apartheid regime, local security initiatives are bloomingin Cape Town and Johannesburg, relying on heterogeneous forms of partnerships between public authorities and non-state actors. The State is reluctant to legislate on these initiatives, and holds unstable, not to say contradictory, positions towards them in metropolitan space and in time. This raises questions concerning the nature of state’s control of the city. We hypothesize that it reflects «flexible governance», the state’s political adaptation to a complex and contradictory relationship with metropolitan space: instability of local politics, debates around the legitimate scale(s) of urbangovernance, and increasing territorialisation of urban policies in a neo-liberal context. |
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Derelict Urban Lands: from the Fallow Stage to Urban Politics |
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by Charles AMBROSINO and Lauren ANDRES
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| The reappropriation of derelict spaces by informal actors can be considered as a paradox for those responsible for urban policy and planning. On one hand, this reinvestment brings about a re territorialisation and a reevaluation of such no man’slands. On the other hand, an accumulating succession of different reconversion strategies impacts upon the planning agenda. The analysis of derelict urban spaces allows us both to better apprehend processes of mutation in contemporary urban contexts and to analyse the coalitions of actors which result from them. The paper discusses this phenomenon, illustrated by the recent history of an industrial district, Berriat (Grenoble). |
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Urbanism and Neighbourhood Activism in the Working Class Districts ofValladolid |
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by María A. CASTRILLO ROMÓN and Luis SANTOS Y GANGES
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When compared to outcomes in other neighbouring Spanish towns, the way inwhich power relations are expressed and have evolved between the town council of Valladolid and district neighbourhood associations in matters concerning urban space illustrate both similarities and differences. During the 1970´s the urban context was generally favourable to the formation of neighbourhood associations with political agendas. From the 1980´s onwards, this process in Valladolid continued within a framework of conflictual cooperation, and important urban changes occurred in districts as a result of neighbourhood initiatives. After 1995, the relationship between local residents and the town council evolved into some formal structures of participation the efficiency of which was both largely dependent on informal contacts and was extremely vulnerable to conflicts, and this in turn rendered the capacity of local residents to influence urban decision making much more uncertain. |
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Scenographies for a Simulacrum: the Reenchantment of Public Space
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by Jean-Pierre GARNIER
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| How to make sense of the current staging, via «requalification» and «eventorganizing» in some public spaces, of a form of urbanity characterized by fun-see-king and convivial reappropriation of the city? Is it an opportunity given to urbanites to act for themselves and assert their own understanding of collective life, or a conditioning and normalizing attempt to secure social peace? This paper discusses the context and aims of this «apparatus», in the sense given to the term by philosopher G.Agamben: «anything that has, in one way or another, the ability to capture, direct, determine, intercept, shape, control and ensure the movements, behaviours, opinions and discourses». |
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Spaces and Strategies of Resistance: Some Repertoires of Collective Action inContemporary France |
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by Fabrice RIPOLL
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| This article analyses the spatial dimension of militant strategies and of their possibilities or difficulties of realization. The analysis is based on investigations of «unemployed people movements», «altermondialist» movements as well as several student movements. Two structural mutations of the French political field are first described: the multiplication of levels of decision-making and the growing importance of mass media. Then, three significant strategies of intervention in public space are considered: demonstrations and other uses of central spaces by the crowd; «radical» or «symbolic» actions in strategic places by little groups; «forums» and other attempts to constitute a new agora. |
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Territorial Aspects of the «War on Terror» |
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by Stuart ELDEN
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| While geographical aspects of the «war on terror» have received extensive discussion, the specifically territorial aspects have been less well explored. This article engages with the relation between territory and terror through three main angles. First, the relation between terrorist training camps and the absence of sovereign power over territory in particular places is examined through a broadening of Agamben’s notion of a «space of exception». Second, the portrayal of al-Qaeda and militant Islam more generally as a deterritorialised organisation is interrogated, noting the territorial aspects of its operations. Third, the territorial responses are studied, particularly looking at the way the international legal term of territorial integrity, with its dual meanings of territorial preservation and territorial sovereignty is under increased threat. This is illustrated with a study of Afghanistan and Iraq and particularly through an analysis of recent events in Lebanon. |
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Gender and Generation Relations in Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods of the Lyons Region |
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by Abdelhafid HAMMOUCHE
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| This paper deals with generation and gender relations among ethnic minorities. The analysis takes account of the effects upon immigrant families from their entry into France in the 1960’s fordist period until the present in terms of repositioning both within the family and in public life in relation to two distinct patterns. The traditional one is clearly structured by the prospect of return to the homeland. In the emerging one, the prospect is unclear. The shift occurs when women and young girls in public spaces no longer consider themselves as merely in transit They have now become more visible in public, even though this space remains more associated with masculinity. This transition allows those of both sexes who have gained enough social capital to disengage at least in part from the generation and gender relations prevailing in the fordist period. |
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Today’s Family Garden: Socially Arranges Spaces |
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by Frédérick Guyon
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| This ethnological and sociological research illustrates how family gardens give evidence of the plurality of life styles of the families themselves. These life styles are revealed both by how the space is organised and by how it is described by the gardener. The study has a heuristical function in the way it reveals the different types constitutive of this new social plurality, and an analytical function in the way it identifies the factors creating these customs. We can thus see the garden as a place where different layers of diverse cultures are sedimented one upon the other. Consequently, they support the production of consumable and exchangeable goods such as vegetables, fruit or flowers, but they also can be places of rest, relaxation and conviviality, «country side islands». |
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Reurbanisation or Gentrification? Routes for Entry into Adult Life and Urban Change in Bruxelles |
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by Mathieu VAN CRIEKINGEN
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| Contemporary evolution of the patterns of residential occupation of town centres is marked by the growth of diverse house hold forms distinct from the nuclear family model. Some draw the conclusion from this that this is evidence of a new phase in advanced capitalist societies, that of «reurbanisation». This article puts the emphasis on the growing presence of young adults in town centres, either living alone or with a partner, and links this evolution to contemporary mutations of the ways by which young people enter adult life. The analysis attempts to identify the nature of the territorial dynamics initiated by this type of socio-demographic evolution and to raise questions concerning it through the conceptual prism of gentrification. The empirical observations resulting from the Bruxelles case give grounds for drawing attention to the particular importance of a marginal gentrification process affecting the market for private rented properties. |
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