Workshop Sessions

One of the perplexing aspects of the current period of economic restructuring in U.S. cities has been the re-emergence and extension of forms of labor relations that were previously thought to have been largely eliminated.  Day labor arranged through informal hiring sites located in public spaces is one example of these developments. Elsewhere, I have argued that the re-emergence of day labor is a predictable outcome of the offensive that has been launched against policies and institutions that place a floor under competition in the labor market (Theodore 2007). In the name of greater labor market flexibility, the neoliberal project has sought to dismantle labor market insurance programs and job protection legislation, and to undermine trade unionism and other forms of worker collective action.Unregulated work and labor market informality have flourished in the economic spaces of deregulation that have been cleared by this neoliberal offensive.But this is not the end of the story. Day laborers and workers' rights organizations are actively contesting conditions in contingent labor markets through a combination of organizing, policy advocacy and the creation of alternative labor market institutions.Day laborers have established new governance arrangements in day labor markets, and they have sought to build worker solidarity in what otherwise is a highly atomized job market. This paper examines an important aspect of this politicization of contingent work: the evolution of grassroots organizing strategies by day laborers, an allegedly "unorganizable" class of contingent workers. More specifically, the paper focus on the ways in which repertoires of contestation - based in a philosophy of social transformation through radical democracy and Popular Education - have defused from mass-movement social struggles in Latin America in the 1980s to street corner organizing in U.S. cities today.Through a series of in-depth interviews with day labor organizers, the paper (1) follows the continental travels of Popular Education methodologies, and (2) explores how organizing approaches from the global South have been adapted and recombined to meet the challenges presented by day labor markets in the U.S. which are characterized by substandard employment conditions and violations of core labor laws.
Stratification of labour which is internal to capitalist development has been further intensified in the present phase. In the period following the second world war labour came to be divided into two broad parts those under formal employment employed by formal incorporated enterprises and those who were in non-standard employment. Non-standard employment came to be defined as informal employment in the global south. The lines of stratification between labour have come to be blurred in the present phase of capitalist development, marked by the post-Vietnam crises of the Bretten Wood institutions and two decades later defined by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Employment of the vast majority has come to be, irrespective of the nature of the employer, of the non-standard nature. Hence the division is no longer about the nature of the employer but the nature of employment itself which most ubiquitously is accompanied by conditions of informality. This shift has came about as a result of the change in the profit system that now seeks to extract profit from not just from productive economic activity but from employment itself.
This paper will examine the emergent discriminatory practices that have more often than not accentuated the fault lines of pre-capitalist social discrimination. At the same time, emergent employment practices have changed the urban space as public goods and services, as it were, have come under the profit system reducing the possibilities of mobilisation along class lines within these spaces. At the same time the fluidity of employment relations has for a significant section of the working population blurred the boundaries between town and country as this section sees the urban space purely as a site of earning while locating their political and social lives in the countryside. Addressing discrimination in all its manifestations, and most of all in employment relations, has become imperative for advancing a working class politics.

This paper analyzes the political geography of uprisings in the Middle East. We interrogate the proposition that the use of social media resulted in further articulations in physical space in a manner that may enhance our understanding of social movements in the 21st Century. We try to pay careful attention to national and transnational networks that shape the spaces of insurgency and protest in different countries in the Middle East and North Africa. We attempt to demonstrate how the production of the urban takes place in a cluster of diverse social mobilizations, state-society relations, political cleavages, and the regimes of governance under post-colonial conditions. In this paper we are particularly concerned with the spatial and temporal dimensions of these urban uprisings with a focus on the interwoven relationship between social media that organize political gatherings and communicate political messages; the practices of protest in urban space; and the global and national media coverage of the ensuing events. We thus highlight two related phenomena: (a) the mutually constitutive relationship between messages of social media and actions in urban space; and (b) the tendency for media coverage of events to drive events in specific directions often resulting in a spectacle that accounts for an instance of popular power. Using several case studies, we analyze several recent protest movements as articulated in social media, manifested in urban space, and covered by the national and global media. The first part of the paper is spent on the cases of Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen in the context of the reciprocal interactions between social media, urban space and media coverage. The second part of the paper is devoted to the cases of Bahrain, Syria and Turkey and to exploring the ways in which each of these three components transformed and altered each other. Our discussion highlights the need to breathe the elements of social media and media coverage into the ambiguities of state-society relation, and social mobilizations as key factors in urban uprisings. Finally, we suggest that the reciprocal interactions between social media, urban space, and media coverage, does not simply reproduce the relations between them, but it incrementally transforms both actors and relations. We recognize that these processes generate a multitude of relations grounded in the actual making of urban spaces emerging from the Global South. In the end we speculate on the lessons learnt from studying the uprising in the Middle East and what they may bring to mainstream urban theory and the study of social movements and the politics of insurgency.

Tim Bunnell
Cities of Cities: Asia and the Leading Edge of Global Urban Change

Urban imaginations have long centred around models based on the experiences of a small number of cities and metropolitan regions. An increasing body of scholarship recognizes that such a subset does not do justice to the diversity of urban settlements and ways of life around the world. It is also by now widely recognized that city models have overwhelmingly been derived from experiences in distinct regions, namely Western Europe and North America. One manifestation of this is the ingrained tendency to reference cities back to a small number of archetypes in the West. Therefore, drawing upon my own reading on cities in Southeast Asia, a city with canals (e.g. Banjarmasin in Indonesia) becomes 'the Venice of the East', proponents of high-rise skylines (e.g. in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore) are 'doing a Manhattan', while a sprawling, automobile-dependent metropolis (e.g. Jakarta) is likened to Los Angeles. In each case, cities in Asia are referenced 'back' to putative antecedents elsewhere. However, there are also now increasingly cases where it is Asian cities that are being held up as models or archetypes. What does this tell us (beyond simply affirming the 'rise' of Asian economies)? Is it possible that the emergence of Asian models can provide clues as to how to 'postcolonialise' (Robinson, 2006) Anglophone urban studies? As the leading edge of global urban development shifts eastwards, Asian urbanisms will more and more exceed understandings and vocabularies derived from prior western experiences. Asian 'cities of cities' might therefore help to contribute to efforts at revolutionizing urban theory for a decreasingly western-centred world.

What does it mean to read and interpret movements 'from the south' - 'from' and 'in' southern cities? Building on Rao (2006) and Tsing (2005), amongst others, I critically reflect on divergent ways movements are read substantively and theoretically, and the 'frictions' that lie in and between these accounts. I am interested particularly in the ways in which research on social movements configures a 'politics of the poor' at various scales, that travels in and between debates about: national development and modernization and the problems of inequality; global, often quite universal, critiques of southern states and their broad acquiescence to neo liberal market political economies; and, the grounding of movement politics in everyday realities and struggles in cities in southern contexts. By contrasting and bringing together these readings of movements and their analytical configurations, I explore a framework that attempts to account for the empirical conditions and the politics generated by movements in southern cities under the banner of globalization, illustrated in struggles for land and housing in a Southern African context.

Middle Eastern cities have recently experienced unprecedented waves of demonstrations, coupled by the mushrooming of tent cities, and the articulation of mass demands for political, social and economic change. At the same time, a quieter transformation has spawned a process of 'gray spacing', during which informalities have shaped anew urban spaces and regimes. The paper analyzes and conceptualizes these transformations with a focus on Israel/Palestine, in order to ask: do these transformation herald a new democratic age and the dawn of urban citizenship? Or are there the pangs of a 'creeping apartheid' process, during which ethnocratic and neo-liberal forces co-opt, colonize and entrap the growing class of 'unwanted/irremovable? In the spirit of global urbanism, the paper compares events in Israel/Palestine's main cities to urban transformations in other world regions, and theorize the connection between gray spacing, the current revolutionary pulse and the emergence of new urban regimes.
5-Year Planning, as it is called now, used to be 5-Year Plan. Invented by Soviet Union, it showed an ambition that everything could be planned logically and scientifically, until it was proven to be a failure in the collapse of the planned empire. China is one the few countries in which the tradition of plan is still reserved. However, the name was changed in 2005 when the 11th 5-Year Planning was made. The tiny change is indeed a landmark of China's re-positioning of government's role in market economy. The over-quantified index has been replaced by macro-adjustment and strategic deployment. Government's direct control in all the details of economy has given way to indirect control, while market can play its fundamental role in resource deployment under the guidance to national planning. It's also going to cover the ecological, social and culture aspects, where the market mechanism is less able to overcome the externalities in the economic development. Spatial re-structuring is tangible institutional reform, in which new regions are designated as special zones to match the long-term plan of national strategy. Master planning usually works in zoning and defining the land use within a specific administrative region, which could be conflicting when the economy goes beyond the borders. In China, the hierarchic structure of the authority make it possible for the master planning of regional economy and industrial clusters. Central government is able to coordinate the local governments to minimizing the externalities caused by the deadlock of de-centralized authorities. 30 years after the planned economy, China's authorities have gradually found out a way to interact with the market, so as to maximize the combined effect of "planning market economy" - a third approach to modernization other than the fundamentalist communism or neo-liberal capitalism.
In the years after 1968 Henri Lefebvre declared somewhat prophetically that 'the city' was now being replaced by the urban condition; and the 'secret script' of the city - the plan, was also in doubt. For most postcolonial societies 'the city,' as Lefebvre described it, remained for many years a project that was yet to come. Urban planning was more successful as the technology of the social in the years after independence; it offered a language of development to postcolonial elites, perhaps the only urban script that made sense to them. In recent years, as urbanisation has spread, old style urban planning has floundered, its failures more visible that ever, and also delegitimized by neoliberal critiques. Planning has been replaced by a discourse of infrastructure, particularly evident in Asia. In India, infrastructure or what seemed to stand in for it, has served as the reference point of a series of debates in the last decade: urban expansion and displacements of the poor, the "public-private" model, middle class visions of global modernity, land acquisition and peasant revolts. For many years, crumbling urban public infrastructures epitomized bourgeois shame over Indian modernity's lack of purpose and the alleged corruption of political elites. Elite discourses and media coverage of the Chinese growth model are inflicted with a kind of infrastructure envy and a yearning for a quick transition to a high-rise, spectacular urban modernity. Allied to infrastructure are new technologies of managing urban populations. These initiatives range from biometric cards for slum dwellers which are linked to governmental welfare schemes, enumeration of urban land by linking it to digitized property titling schemes, CCTV platforms to survey streets and neighborhoods, massive transportation databases that are linked to GPS enabled road machines, and large GIS mapping initiatives . Along with the recent biometric UID scheme to be deployed at the national level, these technological interventions have little parallel in any postcolonial society, dwarfing many such schemes worldwide in their ambition. New technological initiatives in the city have tapped into an information populism that cuts across activists, judges, elite managers and liberal modernizers. Transparency, once associated in urban debates with modernist discussions on surface (glass, steel), has now emerged in public discourse ethical filter through which infrastructure is made visible This paper examines the stakes for the move from planning to a discourse of information in postcolonial urbanism
Abahlali baseMjondolo, the South African shack dweller's movement, has, from its inception, stressed, very directly, that it is a space of collective learning. This has been expressed in terms of its declaration of itself as a university and in terms of its thinking about the practice of a 'living learning' to go with its commitment to a 'living politics'. In the six years since the movement was formed it has had to confront a wide variety of challenges and to learn to operate on very different terrains. There have been significant successes and significant set backs and limits to what can be achieved. This paper, drawing on years of day to day participation in Abahlali baseMjondolo, and other popular struggles in South Africa, as well as the academic literature on popular politics in the global South, will develop both an account and a tentative assessment of some of the lessons of this experience.
The paper will explore the role of urban subalterns both as participatory agents in the Arab revolutions and as mediating forces against revolutionary action. One of the main arguments to be advanced is that the positioning of subalterns during revolutionary periods should be understood in relation to their socio-spatial location in the complex urban political configuration. Looking at the revolutionary protest movements in Cairo and Damascus, I will sketch out and examine the differentiated location of subaltern actors in the two urban settings to draw attention to how their positioning in relation to state and government has shaped their engagement in the revolutions. In the Egyptian case, the leading forces of the spectacular Tahrir Square protests, according to popularised accounts, are the educated middle class youth--the media-savvy internet users. This narrative tends to underestimate both the role of popular forces and their modes of engagement in the revolution. In contrast, this paper will explore the modes of urban popular action before and during the revolution. It will do so by looking at confrontations between popular forces and agents of the state (especially the police), the mobilisation of residents of urban popular quarters and agitation and revolutionary action within popular quarters. My examination of popular patterns of activism in Cairo will tie in with a discussion of forms of everyday interaction between popular forces and agents of government and how these have shaped the urban subjectivities that entered into the making of 'the people' as the subject of the revolution. Drawing on my fieldwork in Cairo's informal markets in 2010 and on my earlier work with residents of informal urban quarters, I will situate the formation of these subjectivities in the context of macro socio-political developments brought about by neo-liberal economic policies, namely the growth of informality in housing and labour markets and the intensification of security politics. The Syrian case provides a counterpoint to the Egyptian case and allows for a comparative perspective on the role of subaltern forces in urban revolutions. Damascus presents an example of the fragmented nature of subalternity, which, along with the configuration of the urban space and its modes of control by the Syrian ruling regime, made it difficult to undertake the same type of mobilisation and occupation of central public space as witnessed in Cairo. The paper will explore three features of the Damascene urban setting that help to explain and understand patterns of mobilisation and protest: first, the fragmentation of subaltern identities where sectarian identification is an element of urban divisions; second, the inscription of apparatuses of violence in urban space in a manner that deepens divisions and manipulates sectarian identification; third, a particular pattern of urban reconfiguration by virtue of which segments of subaltern migrant populations are positioned as buffers between the regime and other subaltern groups. These features of urban space in Damascus underscore the importance of the history and character of urban reconfiguration as factors determining the shape and course of popular protest and mobilisation during revolutionary periods. Informality in housing and employment in the case of Damascus are factors of social differentiation and division among subalterns as much as between them and dominant forces. My discussion of patterns of mobilisation in Damascus draws on fieldwork in various urban quarters of the city prior to the revolutionary uprising and on interviews with youth activists during the uprising. In this respect, I will provide a brief sketch of the reconfiguration of Damascus under the rule of the al-Asad regime to allow for a more nuanced view of the differentiated subaltern subjectivities participating in the popular uprising.
This paper examines the new dynamism of China's urbanization in which urbanism has been actively pursued by municipal governments as a strategy to negotiate and contest with the new power structure brought about by the post-reform regime in the era of neoliberalization. Urbanism is seen in this study as an ideology to upgrade and expand the urban built environment as a mean to promote local economic growth, generate fiscal revenue, and secure as well as enhance the political interests of local state officials. The research identifies the salient features of urbanization and urban land development since the 1990s, probes into their social and political origins, and evaluates the effects of the practices of land-centered urbanization on economic growth, regional inequality, and social volatility.  The data analyzed include those gathered from the national level and from the southern province of Guangdong where the impacts of market reforms and globalization have been strongly felt. The interwoven processes of state power reshuffling, urban land development, and municipal finance in contemporary China are believed to have constituted a significant and controversial case for critical evaluation of the political origins of urban revoluti

Relational Infrastructures and the Making of a Contemporary Urban World
In the so-called majority urban world of today, the trajectories of change sometime seem univocal, at others, all over the place. Speeds of transformation are deceptive in their manifestations. The seeming hegemonies behind the logics of mega-development appear to chew up everything in their path. But in their production of more of the same, they leave little to constitute the basis of dynamic interactions between them, and such interactions otherwise constitute the speed, the registration of history.
The chipping away of residential and commercial districts built up over many years to accommodate a great diversity of activities and people produce multifarious dispositions--different gradations of gentrification, renewal, decay, resurgence, and dissipation. While injustice could hardly be more glaring and the poor more discounted, maneuvers to foster more comprehensive integration into urban systems often prove intensely exclusionary. On the other hand, spatial polarization often proves the condition under which the marginalized, weakened or threatened work out operational spaces--however temporary--to establish more effective terms under which to participate in corporate modalities of governance.
Within such conditions, how do the majority of urban residents in the postcolonial urban world put together ways for inhabiting the city? The specifications of land use, the conditions of tenure, the financial procedures for accessing housing, and the calibrations of labor markets are structural devices that generate a specific framework of possibilities. But there are also deep inventories of various social practices, ways of interpreting urban conditions, modes of social support and stabilization that have long "guided" urban residents.
What I want to do in this contribution is to explore some of the practices that residents have used to make viable forms of inhabitation in the postcolonial urban world. Most of these reflections are drawn from several years of research, activism and community organization in Jakarta--now part of one of the world's largest urban regions. While these reflections are specific to Jakarta, other work that I have done over the past thirty years in Africa's major urban areas, as well as in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, make me think that many of these maneuvers undertaken by residents, nominally "belonging" to the working poor, working class, lower middle-class, are also applicable more widely. Here, I focus on infrastructures of relationality. In other words, the ways in which relationships themselves constitute an infrastructure for inhabitation. These relationships are not just social events or descriptors of exchanges and transactions. They are not simply embodiments of sentiment or vehicles for organizing work, expenditure, attention and recognition. Rather, they are materials themselves to be articulated in various forms in order to construct circulations of bodies, resources, affect and information. They are vehicles of movement and becoming, ways of mediating the constantly oscillating intersections of various times, spaces, economies, constraints and possibilities making up city life. Relations are also the tools through which political imaginations and claims are exerted and thus are the embodiment of force. Here, force, regardless of how it is mediated or institutionalized, exists in its potential as a means of urban change. More than notions of social capital, care, support, economy and livelihood are entailed in the efforts inhabitants make to work on and with relations. For what is also entailed are the circumvention of domination and the keeping open of many different trajectories of what life could be all at once.