The dissent city’s urban form

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What happens at the interface of states and urban poor populations that live in informal settlements? How are academic disciplines, such as law, architecture or economics, and technical instruments, such as computer software, summoned to the interactions between experts from state or city governments and the laypeople whose housing and lives the former's work is meant to improve? This paper reflects on these questions as it examines two different experiments, one historical and another from the recent past, in housing provision or amelioration for the residents of informal settlements. In post-revolutionary Portugal, the SAAL (Serviço de Apoio Ambulató rio Local) housing program (1974-76) included 'technical' brigades of legal, architectural and economic experts tasked to help shanty town dwellers improve their housing conditions, either by assisted self-building or classic new-build. It was a clear example of the progressive urban politics of the time, or dialogical technical democracy avant la lettre. Some 30 years later, in Lisbon during the late 2000s, as a part of an urban regeneration program devised within the framework of multicultural urban politics and delegative forms of democracy, a detailed survey of non-and substandard houses was carried out with a bespoke computer software, which aimed at representing the technical feasibility of rehabilitation, rather than replacement, of those dwellings. Both experiments constituted platforms with the stated objective of working for the community and through which new state-citizen relationships were to be forged with the urban poor, but how were the latter's knowledges and wishes integrated?

Urbanities-Journal of Urban Ethnography, 2017

LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype from an informal settlement ...

2018

The article presents a research proposal based on the analysis of three aspects of urban policy and the interaction of authorities with citizens. It points to public innovations as tools contributing to expanding the field of activity of city dwellers; the concept of e-politics and its importance for the development of bilateral communication between residents of the city and the institution of power; the issue of conflict as an indicator of civic interactions, establishing relationships and undertaking various forms of activity. This research addresses issues related to participatory management instruments, city development prospects and forms of co-deciding about it.

The significance and appeal of this book lies in the fact that it contains chapters which propose novel and innovative tools for analysis of the city. What is especially crucial in this publication is the highly transparent and comprehensive manner in which the authors have presented the ways by which they conducted their explorations of the metropolis. The very presence of such broad descriptions of research not only increases their credibility, but, in many places, also makes this volume a sort of manual delineating how to effectively carry out studies of the city that meet the demands of modernity. Yet another valuable aspect of this book is that it allows the reader to familiarize him or herself with inquiries – often very detailed and local studies – which it would otherwise be very difficult to access. Hence this volume becomes a forum where the most notable scholars of urban sociology meet those who are only just starting their academic careers, and where representatives of Western sociology meet those from beyond the center. Quite crucial is that the editors have managed to create such a space where these different – ideological , theoretical as well as generational – perspectives on urban research can be confronted with one another in a creative, scholarly dialogue. Professor Marek Krajewski, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Not only the extensive range of topics covered, but, above all, the intellectual level of the chapters – as well as the multinational representation of the authors – render this a volume which will be received with great interest and thoughtful consideration by broad, international circles of readers. These will principally include sociologists, especially those studying urban issues, but also representatives of local governments. Generally speaking, this will draw persons interested in urban politics broadly understood as well as those interested in the social issues of contemporary cities and their prospects for development. This book introduces the reader to the multicolored mosaic of urban problems. It sheds light on them through the prism of various theoretical concepts and methodological approaches. Moreover, it applies the latest technologies for gathering and processing information about the cultural patterns of urban life as well as the structural identities of cities.

2011

WITH INCREASED URBANIZATION AND RAPID URBAN DEVELOPMENT, CITIES WORLDWIDE HAVE MOVED FROM A QUALITATIVE URBANISM - AS A VEHICLE OF SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEVELOPMENT - TO A QUANTITATIVE URBANISM OF MUSHROOMING URBANIZATION, DEVOURING CULTURAL, ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECOLOGICAL RESOURCES. IN THE WAKE OF GLOBALISM FORCES, URBANIZATION HAS ALSO SHIFTED THE PARADIGM OF THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF CITIES. SINCE THE ADVENT OF SEEMINGLY MODERNIST URBANISM AT THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, THE CONTEMPORARY URBAN FORM IN MOST CITIES OF THE WORLD HAS PURSUED A GLOBAL AND COSMOPOLITAN IMAGE. THIS NEW IMAGE OF TABULA RASA AND ABSTRACTION HAS HAD NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES ON SOCIAL AND CULTURAL SUSTAINABILITY.

ÀMJAU, 2022

The present contribution is interested in the study of New Cities built by large private developers in the outskirts of Morocco's big cities. These projects, which are most often carried out within the framework of so-called 'derogatory' urban planning and based on international urbanism models, are often presented by their developers as being sustainable and innovative projects that would be completely different from the 'struggling' New Cities launched a few years ago by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning. Analyzing the process of their realization or production as well as the logic of their integration in their implantation territories, the contribution questions how these socalled "new generation" projects can represent a break from their predecessors. Where does the local territory stand in the process of their production and management? Based on a series of investigations around some of these ongoing operations, and combining literature search and interviews with project developers, associations, and local populations, this work shows that these operations, described as 'ecological enclaves', simply rehash opportunity urbanism, which is mainly focused on the international market and disconnected from the local territorial context.