Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality: Interdisciplinary and Comparative Dialogues

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Description

In Mexico City, as in many other large cities worldwide, contemporary modes of urban governance have overwhelmingly benefited affluent populations and widened social inequalities. Disinvestment from social housing and rent-seeking developments by real estate companies and land speculators have resulted in the displacement of low-income populations to the urban periphery. Public social spaces have been eliminated to make way for luxury apartments and business interests. Low-income neighbourhoods are often stigmatized by dominant social forces to justify their demolition. The urban poor have however negotiated and resisted these developments in a range of ways. This text explores these urban dynamics in Mexico City and beyond, looking at the material and symbolic mechanisms through which urban marginality is produced and contested. It seeks to understand how things might be otherwise, how the city might be geared towards more inclusive forms of belonging and citizenship.

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Critical, wide-ranging and committed to theoretical and epistemic openness and plurality, this insightful book is more than a collection of essays about urban marginality. It offers a refreshing contribution to the North-South debate in urban theory, and exemplifies precisely the kind of approaches we need to develop theoretically-open, critically-informed and politically-engaged scholarship. This book should be read by anyone interested in and concerned about the present and future of urban lives.

Author Bio

Julie Cupples is Professor of Human Geography and Cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK Tom Slater is Reader in Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh, UK