Conflicts in the City: Reflections on Urban Unrest

$190.00

Luis del Romero Renau (Editor)
Department of Geography, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

Series: Urban Development and Infrastructure
BISAC: SOC026030

The international financial crisis is the confirmation of the collapsing major social pact of the twentieth century: the progressive dismantling of the Welfare State, degradation of living conditions in the city, the rise of urban ghettos in European cities, etc. In southern European countries, two social and political failures of great significance have emerged: the failure of the promise of continuous standard of living improvements, with the verification that younger generations will have worse living conditions than their parents; and secondly, the failure of the binomy political democracy – capitalism.

This tension has meant suspending the regular democratic mechanisms in countries such as Ireland, Portugal and Greece, and it has also been expressed with a growing imposition of authority from post democratic institutions, making them practically free from democratic control. In this context, the urban conflict becomes the center of political, academic and public debates, especially after the new cycle of protests started in 2011, with the global movement of the indignant to occupy the Arab Spring. The novelty is that this cycle of protests becomes almost global, and is no longer centered in the workplace as it traditionally occurred, but in the areas of social reproduction: housing, public space, education, health or environment are some of the reasons for protest. This book stands at the center for the analysis of urban conflicts, the set of protests taking place in the city to contest the way it is planned, governed, managed, imagined and represented.

Therefore, the aim is to understand the conflict as a social phenomenon; it devotes full attention \ to analyze the genesis, evolution and resolution by consensus or not of a wide range of cases of conflict. The starting point is the consideration of urban conflict as a positive and necessary scenario for communication between urban actors at a time or situation where there is no such communication. The book is intended mainly from a multidisciplinary and multicultural perspective to reflect and understand how and why territorial conflicts arise in the city and its principal expression of protest.
(Imprint: Nova)

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Volume
(Luis del Romero Renau, Department of Geography, University of Valencia, Spain)
pp. vii-xi

Part One: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges for the Research
of Contentious Urban Politics
pp. 1

Chapter 1
Conceptualizing Urban Conflicts
(Luis del Romero Renau, Department of Geography, University of Valencia, Spain)
pp. 3-16

Chapter 2
New Approaches in Urban Conflict Analysis
(Catherine Trudelle and Mathieu Pelletier, Department of Geography, University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada)
pp. 17-40

Part Two: Citizen Mobilization, Strategies and Power
pp. 41

Chapter 3
Contentious Mobilization and the Challenge of Reflexivity in ‘Strategic’ Urban Development Projects: Reflections on Planning Conflict in the Case of MediaSpree, Berlin
(Enrico Gualini, Institut für Stadt- und Regionalplanung, TU Berlin, Germany)
pp. 43-66

Chapter 4
Class Warfare Outside an Inside Urban Social Movements: How the Upper Middle Class used the “Right to the City”
(Nicolas Framont, Institut des Sciences Humaines Appliquées, University of Paris-Sorbonne, France)
pp. 67-80

Chapter 5
Social Movements in Urban Conflicts: The Case of Barcelona and Valencia
(Luis del Romero Renau, Department of Geography, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain)
pp. 81-98

Chapter 6
Crisis and Rebirth of Social Movements: The Experience of Valencia (Spain): 1975-2015
(Josep Sorribes i Monrabal, Local Development Institute, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain)
pp. 99-110

Part Three: Contesting Urban Planning and Projects
pp. 111

Chapter 7
Analysis of Urban Conflict Networks: Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives
(Mathieu Pelletier and Catherine Trudelle, INRS (Montreal, Canada) and Department of Geography, University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada)
pp. 113-136

Chapter 8
A Latent Urban Conflict: Co-Existence of Wealth and Poverty in the Southern Metropolitan Periphery of Sofia, Gated Communities and Social Conflicts in the Post-Socialist Suburbs
(Velislava Simeonova, Ivaylo Stamenkov and Petar Stoyanov, Department of physical Geography and Regional Analysis, University of Barcelona, Spain, and others)
pp. 137-150

Chapter 9
Four Decades of Territorial Conflicts and Civil Demonstrations in La Marina Alta County (Spain)
(Ignaci Cervera Arbona, Joan Miquel Rafet Soriano, Josep Vicent Sánchez Cabrera, Maria Josep Ripoll Berenguer, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain, and others)
pp. 151-174

Chapter 10
Conclusions: Ten Questions for Further Research on Urban Conflicts
(Luis del Romero Renau, Department of Geography, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain)
pp. 175-182

About the Editor
pp. 183

Index
pp. 185-191

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