Routledge City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy

Product Description What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics? City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions, and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They explore the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), Researchers for Fair Policing (New York), Urban Movement Congress (Poland), urban activism (Berlin), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope and protests against Academic Ball in Vienna (Austria). By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy. Review "The book documents a moment of resistance that has spread around the world – moving from the Global South to the Global North – and that has attracted castes of people who are not the usual suspects out into the streets. In so many places and cultural contexts, as the pace of social, economic and political disenfranchisement increases, and more people find themselves on the outside of taken-for-granted social systems, the accounts in City Unsilenced shout out loud: these things really happened." -Urban Studies "This cutting-edge collection raises important and salient questions and provocations about urban resistance in the context of dominant neoliberal practices in many cities in the contemporary era. Its distinctiveness lies not only in its excellent critical analysis but also in its breadth of case studies, drawing insights from a variety of sites and cities across the globe. This is a must-read for urbanists and activists who recognise the crucial importance of public space for transformative urban politics."-Sophie Watson, Professor of Sociology, The Open University "In response to austerity politics and market-based governance of urban land, large-scale social protest has erupted in the public spaces of cities across the globe. In City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy, editors Jeffrey Hou of UW-Seattle and Sabine Knierbein of SKuOR, Vienna – both scholars of the dynamics of public space –have compiled the stories, strategies and the-ories derived from social movements in urban spaces since 2011. In this volume, the collected authors demonstrate how public spaces in cities operate as both the subject and object of civic unrest." - Naomi Adiv, Portland State University, USA   About the Author Jeffrey Hou is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work focuses on design activism, public space, and cross-cultural placemaking. He is the editor of Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010) and he was the City of Vienna Visiting Professor at TU Wien (2013). Sabine Knierbein is Associate Professor for Urban Culture and Public