Lecture 21 - Urban Social Movements & Emancipation

In what 3 ways does urban space facilitate emancipation?

1. accomodating environment

2. activist space

3. object of collective action

Explain the essence of ‘gentrification: emancipation thesis’

This contrasts the view that gentrification is always oppressive, and highlights how it can offer freedom, visibility, and safety for marginalized or alternative lifestyles.

• Early gentrifiers are often people who challenge suburban or patriarchal norms and seek diverse, open-minded urban communities.

what’s the difference between demographic flow through cities in the past and present?

Before, people would suburbanize after finishing uni or getting their 1st job

Now, young people tend to stay in urban environments for longer

Explain Qian’s ‘Right to the City’ key principle and 2 ways to put it to practice

Pleads to reverse the alienation and exclusion in capitalist urbanisation.

1. Democratizing decision-making process…

   … so that previously disempowered groups can make claims in a common space of participation

1. Underlining use value (instead of exchange value) as the organizing principle of urban spaces…

   … while entitling the users and inhabitants of urban spaces (rather than property owners) to the resources the city has to offer.

Explain DIY urbanism

Small-scale, often informal or unauthorized interventions in urban space carried out by citizens, activists, or local groups—rather than by governments or developers—to improve or reclaim parts of the city for public use.

What are ‘urban interstices’

The small, leftover, or in-between spaces in cities—often unplanned, underused, or overlooked in official urban design.

• alleyways, vacant lots, gaps between buildings, underpasses, or margins of infrastructure.

• susceptible to DIY urbanism (from my own interpretation lol)

What does James Holston’s concept of ‘Autoconstruction’ refer to? How does this relate to the term ‘insurgent practices’?

The process by which residents, particularly in the urban peripheries of Brazil, build their own homes and communities without formal planning or state support.

Insurgent practices refer to grassroots, often informal actions that challenge dominant power structures, norms, and exclusions in the city—especially around who has the right to build, inhabit, and shape urban space. Autoconstruction could thus be seen as the material form of insurgency.

How does self-made DIY urbanism differ from regular DIY urbanism

Regular DIY urbanism:

• bottom-up urban interventions by designers, artists, middle-class residents, or activists, often in Western or Global North cities.

• Seen as voluntary and often done for aesthetic or community-oriented reasons.

• often get support from government

Self-made DIY urbanism

• informal, necessity-driven interventions by marginalized groups

• in response to lack of support from government

• often survival-based rather than expressive or artistic.