Abstract Social movements have played a central role in guiding political developments across Latin America for decades. Which particular groups have led the struggle, with what mobilization strategies and aims, and in which territorial spaces have shifted over time. In contrast to the period between the 1970s and 1990s, when cities hosted a preponderance of social movements clamoring for regime change in Latin America, by the 2000s mobilizations were as likely to emerge in rural as urban areas and to focus on regional livelihoods and conditions. Likewise, when democratization produced new political institutions for claim-making, movements began to use decentralized participatory processes to demand services, infrastructure, and public goods, participating in formal state politics more than challenging them. As movements focused less on regime change and more on everyday conditions, new forms of contestation emerged, with activists adopting spatial tactics to challenge or disrupt conditions and using these strategies as symbolic expressions of dissatisfaction as much as a means for demanding remedial action from the state. This chapter documents and accounts for historical changes in the geography and spatial tactics of Latin American social movements. Drawing on general trends across the region, it identifies new repertoires of mobilization, links them to changing social, political, and economic conditions, and assesses the significance of these shifts for both the theory and practice of social mobilization in contemporary Latin America.

Abstract Social movements have played a central role in guiding political developments across Latin America for decades. Which particular groups have led the struggle, with what mobilization strategies and aims, and in which territorial spaces have shifted over time. In contrast to the period between the 1970s and 1990s, when cities hosted a preponderance of social movements clamoring for regime change in Latin America, by the 2000s mobilizations were as likely to emerge in rural as urban areas and to focus on regional livelihoods and conditions. Likewise, when democratization produced new political institutions for claim-making, movements began to use decentralized participatory processes to demand services, infrastructure, and public goods, participating in formal state politics more than challenging them. As movements focused less on regime change and more on everyday conditions, new forms of contestation emerged, with activists adopting spatial tactics to challenge or disrupt conditions and using these strategies as symbolic expressions of dissatisfaction as much as a means for demanding remedial action from the state. This chapter documents and accounts for historical changes in the geography and spatial tactics of Latin American social movements. Drawing on general trends across the region, it identifies new repertoires of mobilization, links them to changing social, political, and economic conditions, and assesses the significance of these shifts for both the theory and practice of social mobilization in contemporary Latin America.

This chapter explores some of the urban conditions that can impact violenceViolence against women levels the Latin American and Caribbean citiesCities. After delving more deeply into the connection between urban violenceViolence in general and the dynamics of violenceViolence against women, it focuses on how the latter unfolds in the different urban spacesUrban space, distinguishing between the private and the public realms of the urban spaceUrban space. The chapter also offers a review of some of the most common ways, in which urban policiesUrban policies have tackled genderGender violenceViolence in citiesCities and offer some guidelines for how to develop urban policiesUrban policies that support genderGender equality. It highlights how there is a tendency to support policies that address the outcomes rather than the causes of genderGender inequalityInequality, whether in the household or the cityCities. These policies tend to revolve around seeing women as victims and segregating women and men, without addressing the problem of abusive men and violenceViolence in society. It calls for urban planningUrban planning practitioners and policymakers to internalize the notion that preventing violenceViolence against women is the first step in producing equitable citiesCities.

This chapter adopts a 'scales of risk and resilience' framework to assesses the multiple territorial sites and forms in which the various risks and attendant securitization strategies associated with refugee migration unfold (ranging from global security risks and challenges to national sovereignty to a range of insecurities occurring in camps and other refugee settlements at the urban, national, and regional scales). It asks whether strategies to minimize risk by fostering resilience at one scale or site might negatively affect another. Empirical evidence is drawn from the Middle East and the Levant, where the current political context has dramatically heightened migratory flows and security preoccupations in recent years, as well as from Colombia – a country with the world's second highest number of internally displaced people, owing to its longstanding civil war and the numerous failed attempts to secure a stable peace. After showing that not all shelter/settlement arrangements for refugees and displaced populations produce the same degrees of risk and resilience, it argues that location (in cities vs. camps) is only one determinant of outcomes. Another less studied determinant lies in the processes through which housing is acquired; most particularly, the nature of property rights and the formal versus informal nature of housing acquisition.

"Promoting the sustainable development goals in North American cities: Case studies & best practices in the science of sustainability indicators, edited by David B. Abraham and Seema D. Iyer." Journal of Urban Affairs, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

Using a focus on the ways that Covid-19 has impacted everyday life in urban Latin America, this article examines the shifting activities of organized criminal groups in the context of a global pandemic. Using grounded ethnographic fieldwork drawn from Brazil, it asks whether a health crisis with direct life and death consequences has empowered illicit actors, and by so doing changed longstanding relationships between illicit actors and citizens on one hand, and/or illicit actors and local authorities on the other. Its larger aim is to understand whether and how the global pandemic has impacted governance by producing new scalar and sovereignty tensions between state and non-state actors at the scale of the city, and with what implications for the legitimacy of national authorities and democratic governance more generally.

This essay is part of a special section entitled “Legacies of Sociology’s Past.” It addresses the contributions of Janet Abu‐Lughod.

This article argues that efforts to implement collective property ownership via community land trusts (CLTs) in Latin America can be seen as a viable means for reducing socio-spatial inequalities, strengthening the urban poor's 'right to the city,' and enabling more substantive social citizenship. It begins by arguing that, in Latin America, market models intended to strengthen individual property rights can increase urban inequality and spatial exclusion. It then examines recent measures undertaken to reverse the negative impacts of these patterns, focusing explicitly on the adoption of CLTs and how they serve as a means for strengthening urban citizenship. After highlighting the fact that CLTs have proliferated in the US and Europe but not Latin America, we explain how and why a few Latin American countries have nonetheless embraced CLTs. Building on deeper analysis of two cases in the region, Puerto Rico and Brazil, we show that despite the legal and governance constraints of Latin American cities, CLTs can materialise when local authorities join with citizens to embrace these models.

This chapter examines the spatial correlates of urban violence in Latin America, identifying how urbanization processes over the past several decades have created socio-spatial exclusion. It links those spatial patterns to the emergence and proliferation of illicit activities, organized crime, and territorially expanding networks of violence emanating from marginal neighborhoods to the city as a whole. Both state and non-state armed actors are key actors in this path-dependent process by virtue of their efforts to monitor and/or control urban territory for their own gain. In addition, the chapter assesses several recent programs undertaken by local authorities in attempts to reduce the scourge of urban violence. Drawing on examples from Medellín, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City, it identifies the spatial interventions that have made most headway in improving security for urban citizens and discusses the governance arrangements that have made these spatial interventions possible.

This paper examines a public housing project conceived with a progressive commitment to socio-spatial inclusion in Bogota. With a focus on comprehensive planning goals, implementation processes, urban design features, and resident reactions, we show how and why the project’s form and function failed to address inhabitants’ livability concerns. After tracing this outcome to a mismatch between city-wide policy goals and neighbourhood-level actions, reinforced by divergent professional assumptions, we argue that the theory and practice of social justice planning should better take into account the mismatches of scale of well-intentioned progressive ideals, if such outcomes are to be avoided.

Cities across the Middle East have for centuries been ensconced in battles over sovereignty, dating back to the Ottoman Empire and indeed much earlier. To a certain degree, in those periods the Middle East was not that different from other parts of the world caught in imperial or colonial orbits. The role that violence and coercion play in buttressing national-state sovereignty underscores the importance of our leading questions about the normative implications of moving from urban to national sovereignty. In today's world, the idea that sovereignty is exclusively embodied in the nation-state remains relatively undisputed, with very few exceptions. For precisely this reason, asserting sovereignty at the scale of the city would be easier said than done, particularly when such aspirations contradict the priorities or longstanding normative values of both national authorities and citizens.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City . By Matthew Vitz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. xi + 352 pages. Illustrations, notes, tables, bibliography index. Cloth $104.95, paperback $27.95.Diane E. DavisDiane E. Davis Harvard University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 25, Number 2April 2020 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 18Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emz115 Views: 18Total views on this site HistoryPublished online March 13, 2020 © 2020 The Author. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

When Hurricane Sandy hit the New York and New Jersey coasts in October 2012, the region was immobilized for days. Although Sandy’s status was reduced from a Category 3 hurricane at its peak to a Ca...

Research on the influence of gender on productivity has produced inconclusive results. Owing to the inability to identify gender, alone, as the critical factor determining productivity patterns, several studies have attempted to investigate the effects of marriage on women's research productivity. The most important observation that can be made from the close analysis of facilitators just presented is that women are less likely to endorse the importance of organizational and/or structural variables in enhancing their research or scholarly productivity. The women's low pre-tenure rate may be explained as much by the variations between single and married women as by their general status as women. Moreover, the women's relatively higher rate of post-tenure publications may be clarified by looking at similar factors. At the assistant professor level, single women are much more likely than married men or women to be involved with research and teaching at minority research and studies centers, including women's studies centers.

Conventional views of the High Line emphasize either its formal and ecological design attributes or its role in gentrification and displacement. While accurate, such assessments mostly ignore the agency-driven, activist agendas that brought the project about and that continue to propel its equity mission both locally and around the world. This essay places the High Line's implementation and longer-term impacts in the context of citizen advocacy. It reveals the strategies and tactics used by local residents to undermine initial opposition by city officials and local developers; it identifies the ways that project supporters understood themselves to have become victims of their own success; and it details the organizational and programmatic responses undertaken by the Friends of the High Line to compensate for the project's negative impacts, ranging from the development of inclusive programming to the establishment of an inter-city advocacy network for sharing ideas about how to repurpose industrial infrastructures as public spaces that reinforce equity and inclusion.

Rapidly evolving mobility technologies and the associated behavioral adjustments of travelers are bringing about dramatic changes to the morphology of cities, some of which have already begun to take root. With the seemingly endless amounts of data that technology is producing about life in cities, new mathematical modeling techniques will be required to fully understand the impact these changes will have on society. As a consequence of innovation in personal mobility technologies, a combination of autonomous and electric vehicles is being seen by many as the solution to personalized and inexpensive urban transport. In this chapter, we explore some of the ways in which this version of the future of streets could reverse decades worth of efforts by cities to reduce congestion and contain sprawl unless policy-makers are proactive in responding to these disruptive forces. Without active efforts to prioritize shared, public, and active mobility, the introduction of automated modes for transporting both humans and goods in an already contested public realm could mean a reversion to Modernist practices of privileging speed, efficiency, and function over human-scale interactions and serendipity. Politically contentious decisions will need to be made around questions of social, environmental, economic, and public health priorities to ensure that streets are made livable and accessible, particularly for vulnerable and marginalized groups. Ultimately, recognizing that the interests of pedestrians, bicyclists, public transit users as well as stationary street users should take priority over those of personal vehicles (autonomous ones in particular) is key to guiding changing urban morphologies in a way that places sustainability and human-focused development at the forefront.