City, public space and political action

• Type: Chapter or Part of a Book
• Date: 2024

Authors

Pereira, Paula Cristina (Author) FLUP; Afonso, Irandina (Author) FLUP

Book

Title: Urban justice: debating spatial exclusion, common goods and the built environment

Pages: 71-87

ISBN: 978-3-031-73339-0 (hbk); 978-3-031-73342-0 (pbk)

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-73340-6

Publisher: Springer Cham

Indexing

COMPENDEX

Other information

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-73340-6_5

Abstract (EN): The city, and public space in particular, reflects the dual effect of globalisation processes—the depoliticisation and disengagement of citizens, on the one hand, and, the expression of new political spaces and subjects, on the other. We acknowledge that urban spaces tend to be immersed in a diffuse totalitarianism (the result of the entanglement of neoliberal capitalism with technological acceleration) and that political action extrapolates the bonds of nationality and culture. Thus, we challenge the traditional concept of political space in the city (dichotomised into “centre” and “margins”) and the dominant practices of oppositional politics. We argue that the city fosters exposure and confrontation with the other, resulting in new resources that coordinate demands and identities, as well as diversify modes of resistance and democratic practices. At the same time, solidarity is seen as an ethical-democratic commitment, as modes of violence, injustice and discrimination spread and are refined throughout the world. Consequently, what the institutional modus operandi of politics considers “marginal” or apolitical may become politically indispensable to public space due to its radical nature, i.e., the revisionist character of the structures and spaces that organise everyday life and its alternative understandings of politics.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific