CORE READINGS

de Haan, A. (2000). Social Exclusion: Enriching the Understanding of Deprivation. Studies in Social and Political Thought. 2(2): 22–40.

This paper explores the origin of the term social exclusion, and the conceptual landscape from which it emerged, distinguishing more individualistic/liberal uses of the concepts from more collectivist notions centred on a wider social contract.

https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/237389092_Social_Exclusion_Enriching_the_Understanding_of_Deprivation https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/283726971_Globalisation_and_ Social_exclusion_in_cities_framing_the_ debate_with_lessons_from_Africa_and_Asia https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/ eprint/1470367/3/Walker_Beyond-one-dimensional-planning%20IDPR%20final%20 pub%20version%20with%20figures.pdf

Beall, J. (2002). Globalisation and Social Exclusion in Cities: Framing the Debate with Lessons from Africa and Asia. Environment and Urbanization. 14(1): 41–51.

This paper looks at how social exclusion is manifested in cities, and questions whether processes of globalisation exacerbate social exclusion, drawing on research from Faisalabad in Pakistan and Johannesburg in South Africa.

Walker, J. and Butcher, S. (2016). Beyond one-dimensional representation: challenges for neighbourhood planning in socially diverse urban settlements in Kisumu, Kenya. International Development Planning Review. 38(3): 229–345.

This paper looks at the relationship between social identities (including gender, ethnicity and disability) and interrogates the role of strategies of representation in urban decision-making as a means of social inclusion, looking at the case of Neighbourhood Planning Associations in Kisumu, Kenya.

References

Cornwall, A. (2002). Making Spaces, Changing Places: Situating Participation in Development (IDS Working Paper 170). Sussex: Institute of Development Studies.

de Haan, A. (2000). Social Exclusion: Enriching the Understanding of Deprivation. Studies in Social and Political Thought. 2 (2): 22–40.

Fainstein, S. (2010) The Just City. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Graham, S. and Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.

Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review. 53: 23–40.

Hickey, S. and du Toit, A. (2013). Adverse Incorporation, Social Exclusion, and Chronic Poverty. In: A. Shepherd and J. Brunt, eds. Chronic Poverty. Rethinking International Development Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lees, L., Shin, H.B. and Morales, E. (2016). Planetary Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement. London: Polity Press.

Moncrieffe, J. and Eyben, R., (2013) The Power of Labelling: How People are Categorized and Why it Matters. London: Earthscan.

Mosse, D. (2010). A Relational Approach to Durable Poverty, Inequality and Power. Journal of Development Studies. 46(7): 1156–1178.

Turok, I., Kearns, A., & Goodlad, R. (1999). Social exclusion: in what sense a planning problem?. Town Planning Review, 70(3), 363.

Walker, J. and Butcher, S. (2016). Beyond OneDimensional Representation: Challenges for Neighbourhood Planning in Socially Diverse Urban Settlements in Kisumu, Kenya. International Development Planning Review. 38(3).

Young, I.M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Conflicts

Learning Objectives

1. To understand the broad meaning of the term “conflict” in relation to urban processes.

2. To understand conflict as an intersectional political and spatial urban-global phenomenon.

3. To develop a critical approach to the role of planning in the case of urban conflicts.

CHALLENGING PRACTICE: MODULE HANDBOOK

What is urban conflict?

“...[C]ities and spaces are unfinished products of historical debates and conflicts involving meaning, function and form.” (Castells, 1983, p.318)

One of the central issues explored over the last few decades in urban studies, politics and planning is that many cities have become multicultural spaces (Sandercock, 1998). However, while the liberal viewpoint considers the city to be an open and enabling space, holding many and equal opportunities for all residents regardless of religion, gender or ethnic affiliation (Katznelson, 1995); the critical body of knowledge highlights the way in which the city, while apparently released from the shackles of nation- and state-building projects, continues to reproduce existing power structures and is a stratifying place, maintaining patterns of discrimination, exclusion and segregation (Marcuse and Kempen, 2000). [link to module 3. Social Exclusion]

For centuries cities have been divided along lines of ethnicity, class and race. In recent decades, urban processes of ethnic and racial segregation and socio-spatial division reflect a wider phenomenon taking place throughout cities of the Global North and Global South. Urban conflicts scholarship explores the “divided” or “contested” city with two approaches that are often considered contradictory. The first is the ethno-national or racial contested/ divided city (such as Johannesburg and Jerusalem) purported to manifest extreme, ethnonational/ racial divisions emanating from active conflicts over the legitimacy of the state itself. The second is the neoliberal city, where the built environment is formed by deregulating economic transactions, extending competition, downsizing the state, and increasing the commodification of everyday life (Peck et al., 2009).

Urban conflicts should be examined within both the discussion on urban planning and the evolving field of urban geopolitics. It is important to note that the critical discussion of geopolitics and conflicts tends to focus on states’ borders and national territory, while ignoring the relevance of such analyses to the urban realm. In this context, this module proposes that the impact of borders and territoriality is not diminishing in our globalising world. Rather, new scales of territorial affiliations and borders are now recognisable that may be flexible, but are still selective on different geographical scales. Indeed, urban conflicts are not merely examples of international relations, or of military acts and wars, in producing space (Yacobi, 2009). Studying conflicts through urban geopolitics refers to the emergence of discourses and forces connected with the technologies of control, patterns of internal migrations by individuals and communities [link to module 6. Migration], and the flow of cultures and capital (Yacobi, 2009).

Following the above line of argument, this chapter argues that cities are inherently sites of conflict over resources, identity, power and domination; and the question that we need to focus on is how and why agonism - namely the ability of urban systems to articulate and include diversity – is transformed into antagonism, violence and exclusion. Wendy Pullan investigates the role of agonism in shaping urban life while discussing urban conflicts in highly-contested cities such as Beirut, Jerusalem, Nicosia, Belfast and Sarajevo. However, she further (provocatively) suggests that conflicts and contestations should be understood as urban phenomenon (“agonistic practices”), accentuating their constructive aspects in everyday life (Pullan, 2015). Indeed, one could read urban and planning history as an attempt to mediate between different groups, as a practice aiming at balancing conflictual interests (such as capitalist competition or ethnonational domination), as well as a mechanism of reproducing power relations, violence and control.

Some working definitions

“[T]he built environment, the material, physical and spatial forms of the city, is itself a representation of specific ideologies, of social, political, economic, and cultural relations and practices, of hierarchies and structures, which not only represent but also, inherently constitute the same relations and structures”. (King, 1996, p.4)

While acknowledging the inherent agonistic tension in cities (between diversity and control, “urban order” and violence, or between private capital and the common), let us outline some working definitions. Conflict in urban settings often encompasses intersecting conflicts (such as class, gender, race, ethnicity) and different forms of violence (such as state violence in the form of displacement, specific groups’ acts of terror around political and territorial demands, or riots over housing rights, land allocation, migration etc).

While analysing conflicts in urban settings, there is a necessity to look at the urban form and infrastructure which constitute the features of cities, connectivity and the everyday uses of urban space. Urban form (such as in the case of housing or open spaces) and infrastructure (water, sanitation or transportation) interact with the socio-economic organisation of cities and affects vulnerability and the resilience of individuals and communities [link to module 12. Community Resilience]. Here we could refer to a variety of spatial characteristics including the scale and shape of a given city or neighbourhood, and analyse the different levels of accessibility to urban services; the existing dwelling patterns including formal \ informal divisions; the patterns and effects of segregation \ integration; or how enclaves and privatised spaces are developed, instead of being open spaces for public use. Importantly we should also understand the role of both physical and symbolic divisions of space since, as rightly suggested by Diane Davis, when urban conflicts were studied “it is almost always with the presupposition that identity conflicts are fuelled by, and most evident in, physical separation - that it is in the form of divided cities” (Davis, 2011, p.228).

Finally, the spatial reading of conflicts in cities necessitates our political view of urban conflicts. A telling example is the concept of urbicide, namely the killing of cities. As elaborated by Sara Fregonese (2019), urbicide is partly related to demonisation of place and linked to the new wars discourse. This term was originally used to describe urban restructuring policies in 1960s United States, which were based on a modernist, hyper-capitalist development agenda. It was then used to indicate the destruction of cities during the Balkan conflicts and, later, in other cases of urban warfare. While urbicide might describe an extreme conflict, we are aware that conflict can operate through the “invisible” hand of the market. Most actions that solidify the processes of division, including those based on violence, are performed by forces that banalise the application of violence. As planners, can we think politically about how tourism development, housing or land use have become elements through which conflict and control are consolidated?

However, far-reaching spatial control is limited in what in can accomplish in urban settings for many reasons, including the scale, density and the emancipatory nature of cities. The “Arab Spring” events show that there is a significant urban dimension to the uprisings that have occurred since 2010 in Middle Eastern cities. The city was not solely the main scene of the protests (in the squares and streets), but also at the very core of the events that led to the uprising. These events include forced displacement, hyper-segregation and the extensive privatisation of urban space in the name of neoliberal policies (Sharp and Panetta, 2016).

Video

Bhavnani, R. and Reul, M. (2019) ‘The Morphology of Urban Conflict’, Global Challenges: New Grammars of War: Conflict and Violence in the 21st Century, 5 (April).

https://globalchallenges.ch/issue/5/ the-morphology-of-urban-conflict/ https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index. php/mcs/article/view/5107/5720 https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:6432/ PreventingViolentUrbanConflict-Aug-2017.pdf

Yacobi, H. (2016) ‘From ‘Ethnocracity’ to urban apartheid: the changing urban geopolitics of Jerusalem\al-Quds’, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, 8(3) pp.100-114.

Cockayne, J., Bosetti, L. and Hussain, N. (2017) ‘Preventing violent urban conflict: a thematic paper for the United Nations-World Bank study on conflict prevention’, United Nations University Centre for Policy Research Conflict Prevention Series, 2 (August).

Castells, M. (1983) The City and the Grassroots: A cross-cultural theory of urban social movements. London: Eduard Arnold.

Davis, D.E. (2011) `Conclusion: Theoretical and empirical reflections on cities, sovereignty, identity and conflict`, in Davis, D.E. and de Duren, N.L. (eds.) Cities and Sovereignty: Identity politics in urban spaces. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Fregonese, S. (2019) `A demarcation in the hearts: everyday urban frontiers in Beirut´, in Yacobi, H. and Nasasra M., (eds.) Routledge Handbook on Middle East Cities. London: Routledge.

Katznelson, I. (1995) `Social Justice, Liberalism and the City´, in Morrifield, A. and Swyngedouw, E. (eds.) The Urbanization of Injustice. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 45-64.

King, D.A. (1996) `Introduction: Cities, texts and paradigms´, in King, D.A., Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21th century Metropolis. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, London: MacMillan Press.

Marcuse, P. and Van Kempen, M. (eds.) (2000) Globalising Cities: A New Spatial Order? London: Blackwell.

Peck, J., Theodore, N., Brenner, N. (2009) `Neoliberal urbanism: models, moments, mutations´, SAIS Review, 29(1), pp. 49–66.

Pullan, W. (2015) ‘Agon in urban conflict: some possibilities’, in H. Steiner and M. Sternberg (eds.), Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the history and philosophy of architecture. Farnham, England: Ashgate, pp. 213-224.

Sandercock, L. (1998) Towards Cosmopolis. Chichester: Wiley.

Sharp, D. and Panetta, C. (eds.) (2016) Beyond the Square: Urbanism and the Arab uprisings. New York: Terreform/Urban Research.

Yacobi, H. (2009) `Towards urban geopolitics´, Geopolitics, 14, pp. 576–581.