Territorializing Democracy

Reviews / Votes

A highly original study which relocates thinking about participation and democracy through the territorial and the urban. Underpinned by years of field work in Buenos Aires, this book opens up debates on how participation generates change in practice and how new theorizing enables us to visibilize its significance, greatly strengthening participation studies as a field. -- Jenny Pearce * visiting professor, International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics * Rare in its combination of extensive empirical engagement and deep theoretical reflection, Territorializing Democracy makes a significant and novel contribution to debates on the relationships between participation, democracy, and urban space. Students and scholars of geography, urban studies, and politics will learn much from this excellent book. -- Ross Beveridge * author of How Cities Can Transform Democracy * Innovative and important, Territorializing Democracy makes a vital contribution to ongoing debates on participation, territory, and urban democracy. The scholarship is first-rate, and the point of view is absolutely novel, an important criterion given the crowded nature of the discussion on participation. This book will be a reference point moving forward on how to think about and research participation and territory. -- Gianpaolo Baiocchi * author of We, the Sovereign * In this fascinating study of social movement activism in Buenos Aires, Sam Halvorsen examines how urban participatory innovations, created both by agents of the state and by civil society, have enabled an increasingly active democratic politics. Primarily examining neighourhood-based territorial mobilization-mobilization in the spaces of everyday life-Halvorsen nonetheless connects this activism to a broader multi-scalar politics. This is an important and provocative contribution to the social movements literature. -- Byron Miller * coeditor of Spaces of Contention: Spatialities and Social Movements *