IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/urbstu/v50y2013i9p1675-1688.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rethinking Cities in Contentious Times: The Mobilisation of Urban Dissent in the ‘Arab Spring’

Author

Listed:
  • Marco Allegra
  • Irene Bono
  • Jonathan Rokem
  • Anna Casaglia
  • Roberta Marzorati
  • Haim Yacobi

Abstract

Throughout history, cities have been the theatre of social and spatial struggles. The issue of urban protests, however, has not yet been investigated in detail in the light of the growing concern of the need to rethink urban studies, from theoretical and epistemic assumptions, to methodological issues. It is argued that the mobilisation of urban dissent in the so-called Arab Spring offers a good opportunity to develop a critical approach based on the observation of the nexus between an event (a punctual expression of dissent) and a site (the urban environment in which the former takes place). The goal is to avoid theoretical rigidities inherent to the assumptions about the intrinsic qualities of cities or social movements. The paper also aims at connecting different academic and disciplinary traditions across linguistic divides—and especially the Anglophone urban studies with the Francophone stream of city-focused political science and political sociology.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Allegra & Irene Bono & Jonathan Rokem & Anna Casaglia & Roberta Marzorati & Haim Yacobi, 2013. "Rethinking Cities in Contentious Times: The Mobilisation of Urban Dissent in the ‘Arab Spring’," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(9), pages 1675-1688, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:50:y:2013:i:9:p:1675-1688
    DOI: 10.1177/0042098013482841
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098013482841
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0042098013482841?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jennifer Robinson, 2011. "Cities in a World of Cities: The Comparative Gesture," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(1), pages 1-23, January.
    2. Ananya Roy, 2011. "Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(2), pages 223-238, March.
    3. Colin Mcfarlane, 2010. "The Comparative City: Knowledge, Learning, Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(4), pages 725-742, December.
    4. Ananya Roy, 2009. "The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(6), pages 819-830.
    5. Walter J. Nicholls, 2008. "The Urban Question Revisited: The Importance of Cities for Social Movements," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(4), pages 841-859, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sami Zemni, 2017. "The Tunisian Revolution: Neoliberalism, Urban Contentious Politics and the Right to the City," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(1), pages 70-83, January.
    2. Oren Yiftachel, 2015. "Epilogue—from ‘Gray Space' to Equal ‘Metrozenship'? Reflections On Urban Citizenship," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(4), pages 726-737, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Seth Schindler, 2014. "Understanding Urban Processes in Flint, Michigan: Approaching ‘Subaltern Urbanism’ Inductively," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(3), pages 791-804, May.
    2. Tariq Jazeel, 2021. "The ‘City’ As Text," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(4), pages 658-662, July.
    3. Tom Goodfellow, 2018. "Seeing Political Settlements through the City: A Framework for Comparative Analysis of Urban Transformation," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 49(1), pages 199-222, January.
    4. Anke Schwarz & Monika Streule, 2016. "A Transposition of Territory: Decolonized Perspectives in Current Urban Research," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(5), pages 1000-1016, September.
    5. Hyun Bang Shin & Loretta Lees & Ernesto López-Morales, 2016. "Introduction: Locating gentrification in the Global East," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 53(3), pages 455-470, February.
    6. Christine Hentschel, 2015. "Postcolonializing Berlin and The Fabrication of The Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(1), pages 79-91, January.
    7. Gordon MacLeod & Martin Jones, 2011. "Renewing Urban Politics," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 48(12), pages 2443-2472, September.
    8. Allen J. Scott & Michael Storper, 2015. "The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(1), pages 1-15, January.
    9. Andrew Harris, 2012. "The Metonymic Urbanism of Twenty-first-century Mumbai," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 49(13), pages 2955-2973, October.
    10. Seth Schindler, 2014. "Producing and contesting the formal/informal divide: Regulating street hawking in Delhi, India," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 51(12), pages 2596-2612, September.
    11. Jennifer Robinson, 2016. "Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(1), pages 187-199, January.
    12. Mary Lawhon & Yaffa Truelove, 2020. "Disambiguating the southern urban critique: Propositions, pathways and possibilities for a more global urban studies," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 57(1), pages 3-20, January.
    13. Tauri Tuvikene, 2016. "Strategies for Comparative Urbanism: Post-socialism as a De-territorialized Concept," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(1), pages 132-146, January.
    14. Michael Storper & Allen J Scott, 2016. "Current debates in urban theory: A critical assessment," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 53(6), pages 1114-1136, May.
    15. Cary Wu & Rima Wilkes & Daniel Silver & Terry Nichols Clark, 2019. "Current debates in urban theory from a scale perspective: Introducing a scenes approach," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 56(8), pages 1487-1497, June.
    16. Christian Schmid & Ozan Karaman & Naomi C Hanakata & Pascal Kallenberger & Anne Kockelkorn & Lindsay Sawyer & Monika Streule & Kit Ping Wong, 2018. "Towards a new vocabulary of urbanisation processes: A comparative approach," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 55(1), pages 19-52, January.
    17. Tim Bunnell, 2015. "Antecedent Cities and Inter-referencing Effects: Learning from and Extending Beyond Critiques of Neoliberalisation," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(11), pages 1983-2000, August.
    18. Linda Peake, 2016. "The Twenty-First-Century Quest for Feminism and the Global Urban," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(1), pages 219-227, January.
    19. Shenjing He & Junxi Qian, 2017. "From an emerging market to a multifaceted urban society: Urban China studies," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 54(4), pages 827-846, March.
    20. Pablo Mendez & Noah Quastel, 2015. "Subterranean Commodification: Informal Housing and the Legalization of Basement Suites in Vancouver from 1928 to 2009," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(6), pages 1155-1171, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:50:y:2013:i:9:p:1675-1688. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/urbanstudiesjournal .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.