Rights in places: An analytical extension of the right to the city

Following recent scholarship on place and place-making, we identify key challenges for contemporary empirical research using the “Right to the City” as an analytic. We seek to distinguish between the aspirational “right” articulated as a political and conceptual call to arms on one hand, and the “actually existing rights” that are carved out through both formal and informal mechanisms (including political protest) in the everyday city on the other. Actually existing rights are defined not through fiat or via momentary revolutionary acts, but through the durability of relationships between multiple actors, including residents, citizens, states, and corporate agents. We re-articulate urban rights as actually contingent and agonistic properties of the relationships that citizens have with places. This paper uses the historic conflict over community gardens in New York as an illustration of how thinking of rights regimes as multiple, overlapping, and placed helps better illuminate potential political interventions. Thinking of rights and places as plural, overlapping, and contingent is analytically productive because it highlights (rather than overwriting) conflicts between competing articulations of rights and privileges in cities.     

Destabilizing the identity–territory nexus: Rights-based discourse in Sri Lanka’s new political geography

This paper describes the changing discourses of territory in Sri Lanka and their utility in conflict relations. The primordial homeland has been at the center of Sri Lanka’s armed struggle, in which both Sinhalese and Tamil nationalisms have used claims of ancient and ethnically determined territories to justify their right to self-determination, territorial sovereignty, and armed struggle. This identity–territory nexus based on historical argument has been destabilized in Sri Lanka, however. Scholarly findings suggest that historical linkages between ethnicity and territory in Sri Lanka are highly problematic and are no longer effectual means for adjudicating territorial desires in Sri Lanka and producing stable homelands. I argue that rights-based territorial discourses have emerged to enhance the old historical justifications for territorial authority. New narratives based upon fulfilling or denying human rights have been put to work linking authority to territory based upon moral fitness and unfitness, political legitimacy and illegitimacy, and ultimately, upon which political actor deserves to rule the territorially bound population under its control. The first part of the paper examines historical narratives linking national homelands to identity as well as scholarly work that deconstructs this linkage. In part two, external sovereignty and political legitimacy are discussed as the starting point for understanding how rights-based discourses justify territorial claims. In part three, accusations related to human rights violations are described as an important vehicle for shaming political adversaries, undermining their legitimacy, and making and unmaking territorial claims in Sri Lanka.     

Urbanization and class-produced natures: Vegetable gardens in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region

This paper examines urban vegetable gardens in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona (MRB) in the context of a political ecological approach. We argue that these gardens provide an interesting example of how the urbanization process creates particular “socionatures” linked in this case to retired members of the working class who occupy (often as squatters) and transform the interstices left by the expanding city in order to produce food at a small scale. We document how these vegetable gardens are the product of a peculiar form of the recent urban history of the area, and also how they are increasingly under pressure due to the rapid process of sprawl now characterizing the expansion of the built environment in the Barcelona region. Vegetable gardens also highlight the contradictions of public policies in managing urban development, since the general attitude towards their elimination from the urban landscape stands in opposition to many of the sustainability initiatives such as the “greening of cities” promoted by city councils in this area.The empirical analysis was carried out in the municipality of Terrassa, one of the largest cities in the MRB, and also one with a higher number of vegetable gardens. We interviewed 132 plot users and obtained data about the legal status of gardens, their size and appearance, and crops grown, as well as the reasons for pursuing this activity. Our results show that, in general, this is an activity undertaken by people over 60 years old, often retired members of the working class that migrated to Catalonia from other Spanish regions in the 1960s and 1970s, and that use these spaces for a variety of reasons (personal goals, support to their families, and also as a bond to their rural past). Finally, we develop some conclusions regarding vegetable gardens in which we maintain that different social classes may create different natures but that class and power relations appear to legitimize some of these natures over others, for example, private and public gardens having a much larger social and institutional appeal and support than the vegetable gardens of the retired workers.     

Public space design as class warfare: Urban design, the `right to the city' and the production of Clinton Square, Syracuse, NY

Urban designers and their design process remain largely outside the literature on public space. Either designers are cast as simple tools of capitalist social relations, producing exclusionary public spaces, or they figure as entrepreneurs that complement economic renewal schemes through beautification measures that bring business and jobs to the city. This paper analyzes both of these arguments, through an ethnographic analysis of the urban design process behind the redevelopment of a public square in Syracuse, NY. I argue that aesthetic considerations most often derive from economic and political pressures, pressures that draw upon the social contexts of urban designers within an international division of labor and their relationship to class struggle. Because public space serves such an important role in political and social life, its status as a product of urban design should therefore act as a crucial component in any discussion of rights to the city.     

Through the aqueduct and the courts: An analysis of the human right to water and indigenous water rights in Northwestern Mexico

This article examines the relationship between the human right to water and indigenous water rights as articulated in the legal strategies of indigenous Yaqui (Yoemem) leadership in Mexico, and in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights System. Accelerated urban growth and climate change in the area of study are rekindling historical water conflicts between rural indigenous communities and state authorities encouraging urban development. This configuration is not unique to Northwestern Mexico and, thus, offers an instructive case for exploring contradictions and alignments between indigenous right claims and the human right to water. This article addresses the following questions: What role does the human right to water play in the competing claims of state authorities and indigenous Yaqui leadership in Mexico? To what extent can the human right to water be reconciled with the collective rights of indigenous peoples? And in particular, what can be learned from international jurisprudence in this regard? Through content analysis of legal documents and media sources I show that even when Yaqui claims over water are advanced in the arena of international human rights, the human right to water does not have a primary role in framing their demands. In fact, I show that the human right to water was primarily mobilized to uphold rural-to-urban water transfers and undermine indigenous opposition to large-scale infrastructure development. This article produces new empirical knowledge to contribute to scholarship examining what a human right to water means in practice. This line of research is particularly timely as the human right to water becomes institutionalized in the context of growing public debate and legal discussions on collective indigenous rights.     

Re-reading remittances through solidarity: Mexican hometown associations in New York City

This paper analyzes how Mexican hometown associations in New York City practice solidarity so that they might best meet the needs of the transnational communities that they serve. Commonly formed by immigrants in the United States, hometown associations are organizations which send money collectively to their home countries, supporting public infrastructure and community projects. Scholars have debated both the merits of remittance programs that channel migrant funds as economic development and the agency of immigrant economies in neoliberal development structures. Through primary data collected from interviews in New York City, I review the frustrations that hometown associations have with one such program: Mexico's programa tres por uno para migrantes. Concurrently, I examine how the same hometown associations engage ethical economic practices of collective remittance sending and community service provision in New York City. Drawing on feminist literature on diverse economies, I argue that the solidarity work of hometown associations disrupts the dominant remittance as development discourse. Migrants are not content to participate in tres por uno and through practicing solidarity they distance themselves from this neoliberal policy.     

Condemning the public: Design and New York's new 42nd Street

This paper examines the redevelopment of Times Square in New York City and brings together two discourses, the discourse of design and the discourse of eminent domain case law. I argue that both were inextricable parts of the Times Square redevelopment process and served similar functions: defining a public for The New Times Square. By determining what was `in the public interest', eminent domain case law set out two opposing publics: the criminal Times Square public and an idealized general public. By selectively editing the Times Square public's desires and behaviors, design helped define and represent new moral norms.     

The legal meaning of Lefebvre’s the right to the city: addressing the gap between global campaign and scholarly debate

There is a growing consideration globally of a right to the city in urban policies, strategies and legislation. The mention of this concept in the UN’s New Urban Agenda vision statement, in relation to human rights, both acknowledges and encourages this trend. It is also a result of lobbying and contestation. In the Anglo-American scholarly literature, there has been caution as to whether Henri Lefebvre intended a legal and institutionalized meaning for his ‘right to the city’. This paper reviews these debates and from that perspective examines Lefebvre’s positions on law, rights and the right to the city. It locates this within his wider political strategy and in particular the three-pronged strategy he put forward in The Urban Revolution to address the urban question—political foregrounding of the urban, promotion of self-management, and introduction of the right to the city into a transformed contractual system. By contextualizing and reviewing Everyday Life in the Modern World (published immediately before Right to the City), the paper examines Lefebvre’s thinking on rights formation, within ‘opening’, or the process of inducing change. The paper engages with meanings Lefebvre provides for rights in his concept of the right to the city, including his later conception of a contract of citizenship. The paper suggests that engagement with a fluid role of law and rights, in combination with Lefebvre’s other strategies, is important in opening the pathway he charts for the realization of this right, whether through local or global initiatives.     

Beyond environmental impact: articulating the “intangibles” in a resource conflict

Environmental planning is an arena of policy making in which formal public deliberation is among the most extensive. At the same time, environmental disputes can also be among the most resistant to resolution, often becoming entangled in issues that some describe as “intangible”. The discourse is largely structured by regulatory frameworks, such as environmental impact assessment laws and procedures, which focus primarily on operational rights (what one can or cannot do where and when) and tangible impacts on the physical or natural environment. A comparative case study of mariculture in Hawai‘i reveals that a large measure of public concerns focused on collective choice rights (who has a right to make which decisions on behalf of whom) and the more intangible impacts to the social or cultural environment. These concerns are often nested in a historic context that has implications for the social processes that they create. The findings from this study imply a need for more structured or systematic ways to deliberate issues of collective choice rights alongside operational rights within the larger process of environmental planning.     

Of tidy gardens and clean houses: housing officers as agents of social control

This paper seeks to contribute to the theme of institutional geographies by exploring how the prevailing socio-spatial order is recreated and legitimated in the ways in which public rented housing is managed and delivered by housing associations and local authorities in the UK. The public rented sector has been increasingly catering for the most vulnerable sections of the population who are dependent on state benefits and cannot afford any other form of housing. As a result, housing staffs have found themselves having to take on a welfare role which entails controlling and policing social tenants who are seen to be causing disorder in society. This paper shows how a dominant housing management discourse reproduced by policies and staff at both front-line and management levels is that of an emerging ‘underclass’ promoted by right wing politicians and the media since the 1980s. According to dominant housing management discourse the members of this underclass are disrupting traditional patriarchal and capitalist institutions and values. Tenants’ houses and gardens not conforming to culturally and socially acceptable standards of cleanliness and tidiness symbolises tenants’ lack of conformity to the prevailing institutional order. Drawing on in-depth interviews with housing officers and managers, and observations of interviews between staff and tenants in six housing organisations, this paper analyses the ways in which housing organisations seek to control social tenants through the imposition of certain norms of cleanliness over their houses and gardens.     

Urban tree planting programs, function or fashion? Los Angeles and urban tree planting campaigns

Tree planting programs are being implemented in many US cities (most notably New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago) on the basis of the multiple environmental and health benefits they may provide. However, the magnitude and even the direction of the impacts of trees on specific urban environments have seldom been directly measured. In addition, there has been little research on the historical, cultural, political or institutional origins of such programs, or on their implementation process. Pending questions include the degree to which these programs are integrated in the existing frameworks of city government and infrastructure management, how they are paid for, and the kinds of collaborations between nonprofit organizations, the public, and public agencies at all levels they may require in order to succeed. This paper reports on an interdisciplinary research project examining the Million Tree Program of the City of Los Angeles.     

Gated communities,heterotopia and a “rights” of privilege: a `heterotopology' of the South African security-park

This paper attempts a two-tiered analysis of what has come to be referred to as the `security-park', i.e., that South African variation of the `gated community' which combines Blakely and Snyder's [Fortress America: Gated communities in the United States, Brookings Institution Press, Washington, 1999] typically separable `lifestyle', `prestige' and `security zone' gated community types. The first part of this analysis reviews the existing literature on gated communities and relates it back to the South African situation. The second part, both theoretical and empirical, draws on Foucault's [Utopias and heterotopias, in: N. Leach (Ed.), Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Routledge, London, 1997] notion of the heterotopia, and on a variety of textual representations of Dainfern. The heterotopia, as an `analytics of difference' becomes a particularly important means of critique here, drawing attention to security-parks as: (1) possessing a precise and well-defined function within society (a function which typically coalesces around points of social crisis), (2) operating distinctive systems of admission and exclusion, (3) containing certain `juxtaposed incompatibilities' (of which a paradoxical `heterochroneity' is one of the most pronounced elements), (4) embodying – via the espousal of a certain `utopics' – an `alternate mode of social ordering' (in Hetherington's [The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering, Routledge, New York, 1997] term). Each of these analytical strands constitutes a discursive relay through which one might deduce wider networks of social power or in the case of Dainfern or security-parks more generally, historical structures of the race- and class-structuring of privilege and poverty. Representations and practices of the security-park are in this way indicative of a far larger political rationality – a self-justificatory set of entitlements, warrants and exclusionary prerogatives which we have labelled a “rights” of privilege.     

Urban greenspace from the inside out: An argument for the approach and a study with city workers

How might the fact that western people now spend so much of their time indoors impact upon techniques for studying urban greenspace experience? This paper takes this question as its starting point before substantiating one possible answer. It does so by using qualitative methods to examine the everyday practices of city professionals in London and what they tell us about the likelihood that this group will ever venture out into the various parks and gardens found around their offices. Many studies have considered which physical arrangements of city greenspace seem to deliver the greatest amounts of human benefit. Yet this kind of endeavour gives us only one part of the puzzle and contextual studies with those now generally found indoors have something important to add. It is with this in mind that the paper discusses how one sample of office workers quite easily forgot about these spaces, how certain social injunctions both pushed them outside and sealed them indoors, and why it sometimes made good sense for them to avoid any areas of local outdoor vegetation during the day. In so doing it highlights contextual dynamics that seem set to make significant impacts on the future of urban environmental experience and offers some novel suggestions about how best to promote positive greenspace relations in cities today.     

The implications of Maori perspectives for the management and promotion of heritage tourism in New Zealand

Maori images have long been a part of the international tourist image of New Zealand. However, Maori people have increasingly been asserting their rights to control and manage their own resources. The purpose of the present paper is to analyse the implications of Maori perspectives on the promotion, interpretation and management of tourism resources and to discuss the potential short and long-term implications of such perspectives on tourism development.The paper discusses the implications of the Waitangi Tribunal hearings and the overall assertion of Maori rights over tourism resources. While the articulation of Maori rights is by no means universal, several case studies illustrate potential implications of Maori control and ownership for the New Zealand tourism industry. The paper concludes that the implementation of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi provides a basis for reconciling the interpretive and management demands of Maoritanga with the tourism industry in a manner which can have positive outcomes for both.     

Water governance in New Mexico: Adjudication,law, and geography

Water rights adjudications lie at the intersection of law, space, and the geography of resource governance, combining elements of field cartography, archival research, and judicial supervision and decree. However, few geographers have examined the water rights adjudications now active in most western US states. Using case material and ethnographic vignettes from a larger geographic project on water rights and governance in New Mexico, I examine water adjudication as a vital instrument in the state’s pursuit of spatial knowledge. Resources and water users are seen by the state through this process, while at the same time, water users may elude or confuse state legibility. In this process, altered forms of governance are produced. Here, I explore how the formalizing of water rights in New Mexico has articulated new legal-spatial relationships, which are often viewed differently by state and local agents. I then examine the products of adjudications and the tension between local and expert knowledge in natural resources governance over being seen and governed by the state and the struggle to retain local autonomy and governance in water management.     

Cultivating alternative spaces – Zagreb’s community gardens in transition: From socialist to post-socialist perspective

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of community gardens in a (post)socialist setting during a time of key changes in their perception and management. Community gardens in Zagreb emerged in two specific economic and socio-cultural contexts and a diachronous approach to the study of urban gardens offers a unique insight into differences and similarities reflecting and contrasting those periods. Semi-structured interviews and non-participatory observation were employed. Results show that community gardens in Zagreb are multilayered places which satisfy diverse needs of the urban residents, including home grown food, socializing, recreation, contact with the nature, and supplementation for low pensions. They can also be seen as examples of heterotopias or alternative spaces during both examined periods. In the socialist period they were secluded, private, pseudo-rural places in a semi-authoritarian, communal, and (supposedly) urban and industrial society. In post-socialist Zagreb, characterized by an uncontrolled and unplanned spatial context reliant on neoliberal market-oriented principles, social insensitivity and exclusion, the new gardens are depicted as beacons of communal involvement, grassroots movements, and the ability of citizens to stand together and make their voices heard.     

Rethinking graduated citizenship: Contemporary public housing in Singapore

The ways in which citizenship and housing are implicated in states’ global city aspirations demonstrate significant path dependency and local contingency. This paper serves to broaden the literature that has been dominated by the Western neoliberal context. First, I argue that The Pinnacle@Duxton – a one-of-a-kind public housing project in Singapore – represents the developmental state’s attempt to graduate its homogeneous public housing landscape, providing for and subsidizing the aspirations of a segment of its increasingly affluent middle class to buy into the ideology of the global city. Second, I show how the graduation of public housing coupled with the exaggerated demand for such exclusive projects validates consumer preference pricing in contemporary public housing. This results in a geographical graduation of citizenship, where the bulk of the population is relegated to lesser options on the edges on the island, unable to fulfil their aspirations for global living. In so doing, I make two contributions to extant literature on housing and citizenship in the global city. One, graduating citizenship is not always a case of states realigning their relationship with their citizens to fit the terms of the market. Two, the denial of citizenship to the global city does not always manifest in terms of substantive rights. Appreciating the unique histories and ideologies underpinning housing policies in global cities is instrumental if the variegated meanings of global cities and the citizenships within are to be elucidated.     

The Disastrous Flood of 1998 and Long Term Mitigation Strategies for Dhaka City

The disastrous flood of 1998 was a result of excessiverainfall all over the catchment areas of the major rivers of Bangladesh. Dhaka City, which is surroundedby rivers on all sides, was seriously affected despite the completion of Phase I of the Dhaka IntegratedFlood Protection Project (DIFPP). Water entered into the protected part of the city throughhydraulic leakage such as buried sewerage pipes, breached and incomplete floodwalls, ungated culverts andinoperative regulators. The drainage network and retention ponds of the city were found to be in poorconditions and capacities of the pumping stations were found inadequate. There was a serious lack of coordinationbetween the agencies responsible for flood protection and drainage of the city. These issues must beaddressed to achieve long-term flood mitigation. In addition, feedback from both the experts andgeneral public indicated that completion of Phase II of DIFPP was essential to bring the eastern part ofthe city under flood protection. Other structural measures suggested in this paper include installing andmaintaining adequate drainage and pumping capacity and timely operation of regulators. This studyalso suggests a set of non-structural measures for flood mitigation that include protectingthe retention ponds, raising public awareness on maintaining the city drains, introducing landzoning and flood proofing in the eastern part of Dhaka, and stream lining institutional bottlenecks.     

Right to food,right to mine? Competing human rights claims in Bangladesh

The right to food is increasingly evoked by a range of actors, but there is not sufficient critical analysis of distinct interpretations of what this right means in practice. Through examination of a mineral extraction project with agricultural implications, this article explores diverse human rights narratives and illuminates associated corporate efforts to minimize recognition of food as a fundamental right. A British mining company proposes the Phulbari open pit coal mine in an agriculturally important region of Bangladesh. Highly contested by affected populations, clashes in 2006 between the police and protestors turned deadly in the area. In February 2012, a group of UN Special Rapporteurs cautioned the Government of Bangladesh regarding human rights violations associated with the planned mine. They warned that the project would displace hundreds of thousands of people, while destroying fertile agricultural land. In contrast, an ongoing publicity campaign by the corporation attempts to promote their intervention as a positive step, fully compliant with international human rights and corporate social responsibility standards. Taking this case as an exemplar, the article illuminates the pursuit of mining profit and the distinct use of human rights narratives by corporations and UN Special Rapporteurs. These diverse actors represent the layering of voices weighing in on mineral extraction and associated right to food concerns. Collectively, these layered narratives represent a new terrain for the promotion and contestation of mining and highlight the need to scrutinize mining practices in light of social responsibility and human rights claims being voluntary and self-regulated.