The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces

Reviews / Votes

Many cities across the globe have experienced interrelated processes of fundamental economic social, political, demographic, and cultural changes. With the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant paradigm in the closing decades of the twentieth century, notably cities have witnessed a significant extension of the realm of allocation through markets. This development has, among many other things, brought the issue of urban spaces, which are - at least temporarily - outside these market arrangements to the fore. This volume presents an in-depth look at such "alternative urban spaces" from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It clearly shows the many forms and trajectories alternative urban spaces can present as shown by, for instance, makerspaces in Milan and refugee spaces in Cairo as well as by how music has helped to reclaim public spaces in Belo Horizonte. It also demonstrates multiple ways of comprehending these different forms of alternative urban spaces. In a more literal sense, this volume also covers a lot of ground geographically: from Berlin to Beirut, from Milan to Istanbul, and from Accra to Chandigarh. This volume, then, offers a welcome and timely panorama of how urban actors try and often succeed in creating and maintaining alternative urban spaces. Thus, it contributes to our understanding of contemporary urban politics.

- Robert Kloosterman, Universiteit van Amsterdam

This intellectually engaging and empirically grounded book interrogates the political and scholarly significance of alternative urban spaces in today's globalized world. At a time in which technology-intensive capitalism is increasingly seen and experienced as a totality pervading almost any aspect of social life potentially in every corner of the world, this book challenges the commonly held idea within critical urban studies that today's global urbanization of the planet erases the very possibility of an alternative outside. On the contrary, the editors of the collection suggest that there are multiple 'constitutive outsides' within existing trajectories of urban development. Some of these constitutive outsides have the potential to uncover alternative urban futures, as they contain the seeds of radical societal change. The empirical chapters of the book offer evidence to this argument by exploring different kinds of alternative urban spaces (of work, exchange, and consumption; of dwelling; of public life) in a tremendous variety of geographical contexts in both the South and the North of the globe, particularly in Western Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia. For both its conceptual insights and empirical explorations, this book is highly recommended to urban scholars, practitioners and activists committed to a critical and transformative understanding of contemporary urban worlds.

- Ugo Rossi, University of Turin