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citizenship discourse, as it leads to questioning and challenging of the understanding of who is a citizen in China. Challenging marginalisation: the migrant workers’ culture The process of formation of new identities which transgress the cultural ideas of migrant workers as non-citizens begins with the act of ‘challenging’, which targets existing representations of migrants in the mainstream culture. Some NGOs, such as Shenzhen-based ET for instance, highlight the reasons behind the discrimination against migrant workers and
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.
As the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing and deregulation, and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. Safe as Houses weaves together Stuart’s research over the last decade with residents’ groups in council regeneration projects across London to provide the first comprehensive account of how Grenfell happened and how it could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country. It draws on examples of unsafe housing either refurbished or built by private companies under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) to show both the terrible human consequences of outsourcing and deregulation and how the PFI has enabled developers, banks and investors to profiteer from highly lucrative, taxpayer-funded contracts. The book also provides shocking testimonies of how councils and other public bodies have continuously sided with their private partners, doing everything in their power to ignore, deflect and even silence those who speak out. The book concludes that the only way to end the era of unsafe regeneration and housing provision is to end the disastrous regime of self-regulation. This means strengthening safety laws, creating new enforcement agencies independent of government and industry, and replacing PFI and similar models of outsourcing with a new model of public housing that treats the provision of shelter as ‘a social service’ democratically accountable to its residents.
. Membership in an expansive, democratic community of inquirers can ameliorate individual ignorance by making visible a variety of perspectives and experiences. Aspects of the structurally determined ignorance of those who are privileged by historical and existing practices of discrimination might also be ameliorated by full membership in such a community, at least to some extent. A distinct type of embodied ignorance stems from differences in role-related knowledge and the expertise of faculty and students. In the context of the highly racially and gender
morning we have our breakfast (sehri in Arabic) to begin the day’s fast. It is not mandatory for women to pray in the mosque in the way it is for men. However, there are special rooms set aside in which women can pray. Many non-Muslims view this as a form of segregation, yet it is similar to the practise in Orthodox Jewish synagogues and is not a form of discrimination against women. Rather, it is simply to give women privacy and space to themselves. With the prayer sequence involving much physical activity – rising and prostrating on the ground – I prefer to pray
It is sought, I fear, to inflict upon a future Government of Kenya this baby of racial discrimination that has unfortunately been one of the features of colonial administration throughout the century … whether we like it or not what is in fact going to happen in a future independent country of Kenya is that we are going to get one class of persons – persons of one race – getting a particular salary, a very high salary, and another group of persons, whether they are
the inequality that rural migrants experienced after having moved to the cities could be justified by the state and migrants themselves as a ‘necessary sacrifice’ for modernity. And so, with migration, not only did the process of marginalisation of the peasantry continue, but the capitalist and market-orientated mindset of urbanites actually led to increased discrimination against rural migrants in the cities. Lacking access to citizenship rights in the cities, until 2003 treated as ‘illegal migrants’ under the threat of deportation, and experiencing social and
, which constitutes a legal foundation denying migrant workers access to rights in urban China. Yet the migrants’ citizenship discrimination in China also stems from wider social, political and economic factors, which are closely tied to the three areas of claims outlined above. The wider limitations in exercising political, civil and social rights of citizenship, while not targeted against the migrant population in particular, constrain their ability to undertake civic activism aimed at changing their subjugated status and workplace exploitation. The popular suzhi
framework: using the right to the city concept as a measure of socio-spatial justice Over the past couple of decades, the concept of the right to the city has become increasingly popular –within academia (Harvey, 2008; Marcuse, 2009; Mitchell, 2003; Purcell, 2002) as well as within policy-making and advocacy circles (Purcell, 2013a; 2013b; UNESCO, 2006; UN-HABITAT, 2010; United Nations Center for Human Settlements, 2001; Worldwide Conference on the Right to Cities Free from Discrimination and Inequality, 2002). This increasing engagement justifies the multiple