Isolation to Eviction for Nile Island Dwellers

by Abdelbaseer Mohamed

Greater Cairo, which includes the city of Giza, is spatially fragmented and heavily oriented toward private transit. Low-income residents are disproportionately isolated from essential infrastructure, services and job opportunities. Segregation is especially acute on Gezirat Al Warraq and Gezirat Al Dahab, large islands several kilometers from central Cairo. Efforts to solve this problem have encountered resistance from proponents of sustainable development.

Myanmar’s Instant Capital

by Jordi Sánchez-Cuenca

In 2007, Siddharth Varadarajan described the city of Naypyidaw (Abode of Kings) as "the ultimate insurance against regime change, a masterpiece of urban planning designed to defeat any putative 'colour revolution' — not by tanks and water cannons, but by geometry and cartography." Less than two years prior, this brand-new outpost became the capital of Myanmar through a process shrouded in mystery.

Territory and Transgression: An Interview with Stuart Elden

by Peter Sigrist

Stuart Elden, professor of political theory and geography at Warwick and one of the editors of the journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, has published volumes of groundbreaking research on geopolitics and spatial theory over the past decade. His research addresses topics of critical importance to cities today, including globalization, territory, terrorism, power relations and place. It engages with the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, along with many of their lines of influence.

Housing Demolition and the Right to Place

by Tony Roshan Samara

There is no small irony in the fact that the most notable achievement of affordable housing policy in the United States over the past two decades has been the systematic demolition of affordable housing stock. To understand this upside-down world of housing politics, at least as it collides with the lives of the urban poor, we have to understand the moral panic that has developed around the concept of concentrated poverty. Over time, this panic has hardened into a consensus among the urban policy elite. For its members, most if not all social ills associated with cities and poverty stem from too many poor people being gathered in one place.

David Madden on the Shanghai World Expo

Danish Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo 2010. Source: Gizmodo

“[T]he 2010 World Expo in Shanghai ... suggested that the horizon of politics lies in the development of progressively smarter solutions by an alliance of business, science, and authoritarian state and city governments. The global-urban problematic, from this perspective, is above all a question of efficiency and proper management, where political contentiousness, like pollution, is one more problem to be solved.”

— David Madden in “City Becoming World: Nancy, Lefebvre, and the Global-Urban Imagination,” 2012

This is part of the Polis collection of quotes related to cities.

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Mark Purcell on ‘Chains of Equivalence’

Source: New Republic

“Laclau and Mouffe (1985, 2000) understand that if we are to pursue a model of agonistic struggle, existing power differences mean that marginalized and disadvantaged groups will need to assemble creative and deeply political strategies to undo the current hegemony. In that context, they advocate what they call ‘chains of equivalence’: movements made up of allied groups seeking broad transformation of existing power relations. The groups in the chain each have their own distinct relation to the existing hegemony, and each group’s experience and interests are irreducible to the others. Each retains their difference. However, they are able to act in concert around an agenda of equivalence. That is, they see themselves as equivalently disadvantaged by existing power relations. ‘Equivalent’ in this case does not mean identical. They are not disadvantaged in precisely the same way, and Laclau and Mouffe explicitly reject the old-style social movements that reduced participants to a single social position (usually class). Each link in the chain remains distinct, but they operate together, in concert.



“The most talked-about model for this kind of idea is the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ movement that carried out the string of protests in Seattle, Goteborg, Doha, Genoa, Geneva, Quebec, etc. The movement is better understood as an anti-neoliberalization movement, because it involved a range of groups (e.g. labor, environmentalists, anti-third-world debt, human rights in China, etc.) that shared an equivalent opposition to the globalization of neoliberalism. Their concerns were in many ways disparate (outsourcing of jobs, sea turtles, rediscovering jubilee obligations, the occupation of Tibet, etc.), but they strategically defined themselves as equivalent and acted together to oppose the WTO and other institutions committed to neoliberalization (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Each member of the coalition achieved much more than they could have alone, but they did not have to dissolve into a large and uniform collective to do it. While they did not achieve the end of neoliberal hegemony, they certainly succeeded in identifying it and calling it into question.”

— Mark Purcell in “Resisting Neoliberalization,” 2009

This is part of the Polis collection of quotes related to cities.

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Agitation Versus Inequality in Global Cities

by Deen Sharp

In 2012, Trenton Oldfield threw himself into the River Thames to protest elitism in Britain. Oldfield intentionally timed his leap to disrupt the annual boat race between Oxford and Cambridge, yet he may have underestimated the British establishment's love of sport. His act provoked a starkly revanchist reaction: he was sentenced to six months in prison and deemed unwelcome to continue living in the United Kingdom. He is now fighting deportation to Australia.

Reversing the Panopticon

by Dieter Zinnbauer

The infamous Panopticon, conceived by Jeremy Bentham and thoroughly analyzed by Michel Foucault, is emblematic of architecture's role in surveillance and discipline — a blueprint for the perfect prison. It allows a watchman to observe inmates without them being able to tell whether anyone is actually watching them, generating an eerie sense of being monitored all the time.

Injustices of Informality

by Andrew Wade

William Hunter is an architect, urban designer and teaching fellow at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London. I recently caught up with him to discuss his new book, "Contested Urbanism in Dharavi: Writings and Projects for the Resilient City," a collaboration with Camillo Boano and Caroline Newton. Dharavi — perhaps the most famous informal settlement in the world — has featured on Polis many times and we're excited to return via William's experience.

Contested Space, Contested Identity

by Max Holleran


Source: Max Holleran

In cities around the world, public space is an essential platform for voicing calls for change. Whether Madrid's Puerta del Sol, Athens's Syntagma Square, or Tahrir Square in Cairo, this space is the hippocampus of the nation: the first to experience unsettling tremors in the body politic.

One of the most fascinating things about the occupation of Istanbul's Gezi Park was that many of the issues were tied to the use of urban space to promote a contentious version of national identity. It was an expression of widespread frustration with an autocratic urban transformation that has raised questions over which heritage represents the nation in the 21st century.


Protesters react to tear gas on June 15. Source: Enca

Protesters were brutally suppressed after attempting to use Taksim Square as an agora to address urban and national concerns. Over the past decade of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's rule, the Turkish economy soared as Istanbul experienced increasing class segregation and an "Americanization" of the built environment in the form of gated communities and horrendous traffic jams.

Real estate development has been accompanied by wholesale demolition of historic neighborhoods and removal of Roma communities in Istanbul. The plan to place a rebuilt Ottoman military barracks and shopping mall in Gezi Park was a major spark for the protests. Another was construction of a third bridge across the Bosphorus, named after an Ottoman sultan known for massacring people of the Alevi religious minority. The barracks and mall are fitting symbols of the AKP's urban transformation, in which Ottoman cultural heritage is used to build regional support for aggressive market-oriented development.


Source: France 24


Reconstructed Ottoman military barracks and mall planned for Gezi Park. Source: KH

The protests focused national attention on the AKP's increasingly oppressive desecularization of society. The party's deputy chairman recently denounced the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who brought an end to the Ottoman Caliphate and established the modern republic. While such jibes have been isolated and oblique, there have also been more-direct attacks on Atatürk's secular policies.


Turkish flag with a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Source: Kathimerini

Portraits of Turkey's great modernizer still adorn public buildings and private shops in Istanbul, and many of the Taksim protesters feel a connection between their efforts and those of the national patriarch. Flags with his photo have been used as symbols of what's at stake if Erdoğan is given a free hand at widespread reforms.

Members of the AKP suggest that, while acknowledging Ataturk's achievements, they believe his policies were pushed through too quickly and the country must now reclaim its soul. Many in Istanbul feel the same way about Erdoğan's urban transformation.

Max Holleran is a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at NYU.

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Remembering the Urban in the Turkish Uprisings

by Alex Schafran

The occupation of Gezi may be over for the moment, but the ongoing impact of what has transpired and continues to transpire in Istanbul and other Turkish cities will be with us for some time. Amidst a hail of images of unrelenting police brutality and anti-democratic state action, there is a tendency for the urban issues that sparked the uprising to fade into the background. But, as Cihan Tuğal argues in his must-read piece for Jadaliyya, understanding both the urban roots of the revolt and the tendency to immediately forget them "sheds much light on what is happening in Turkey and why."

A development on the Asian side of Istanbul. The national housing agency has been building en masse, often by erasing portions of longstanding neighborhoods.

No small part of the power of recent events comes from Istanbul itself — I know few who've spent time there and haven't been enamored. It is a magical place whose centrality from both a historical and contemporary perspective is without question. However, love for Istanbul is quickly tempered by rampant injustice and an authoritarian transformation that shames a glorious city. This transformation ignores basic quality-of-life issues that could positively impact the lives of millions.

Istanbul love (left) and Kanyon shopping center (right), which is one of the most symbolic of the new spaces of wealth in the city.

Central to the tragedy in recent events is that Prime Minister Erdoğan is partly right — urban transformation is critical to the nation's future, and Istanbul must be the center of that transformation. Sadly, the transformation he has in mind is precisely what isn't needed. It goes far beyond Taksim Square and the ecological time bomb known as Turkey's "third bridge." Istanbul's urban development binge calls to mind recent experience in Spain and the United States, where credit- and derivative-fueled building led directly to economic crises followed by political unrest. In Turkey, the primary difference is that the political has come first.

For many of us, the initial takeover of Gezi was a hopeful sign of what Pelin Tan called the "sound of the revival of urban Istanbul," a revival that instead has been transformed into what Mustafa Dikeç calls an "urban stasis." Yet as urban scholars and activists, we must not let the stasis deter us from reminding our fellow citizens of just how important the urban is to this situation, and that it is too quickly forgotten amidst broader issues of government, democracy and religion.

One of the challenges of an urban focus is that Gezi has exposed two separate but related schisms regarding the urban in contemporary society. One is the debate about development, about what gets built where, for whom and at what cost, about how systems are maintained or connected. This is the debate we need to be having, but one that Erdoğan would replace with another urban divide, one that is more pernicious but equally classic — the division of peoples into urban and non-urban. Erdoğan is attempting to rally his rural base with fiery language about urban elites, pinning his hopes on what he claims to be his majority.

The use of "urban" as a geography that divides people from each other has a long and ignominious history, whether dividing city from country or city from suburb. Listening to Erdoğan reminds me of a half-century of demagoguery that used the urban-suburban divide to sow racialized fear in Americans, creating a highly unsustainable and unequal urban system. But, as in the United States, the "urban" in Turkey is no longer what it was demographically, and many of the people being trampled by Erdoğan's urban regime are members of this previously "non-urban" base.

The challenge now is to push against use of the urban as a dividing concept and focus people's attention instead on development. The idea and possibility of urban development must be disentangled from the authoritarianism, inequality and ideology that cause many to question the value of investing in cities. All places need transformation to survive and thrive, just not the kind that Erdoğan and other powerful men and women have been selling around the world.

Credits: Photos by Alex Schafran.

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Alternative Globalization in ‘Ordinary Cities’

by René Boer


Tunis, Tunisia, site of the 2013 World Social Forum. Source: Paix & Développement

On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people will gather in Tunis for the World Social Forum (WSF). They plan to discuss alternatives to capitalist globalization, in response to widespread economic and ecological problems wrought through market-oriented development over the past thirty years. The WSF has taken place annually since 2001, inspiring national and regional versions in cities throughout Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and South America. These forums have become important congregation points for the alter-globalization movement, and their locations reveal a striking counterpoint to those of "global cities."


A map of World Social Forums (green) and their regional counterparts (pink), by René Boer.

Saskia Sassen coined the term "global cities" in reference to increasingly interconnected nodes of worldwide economic and political influence. Periodic reports like the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Classification or the Foreign Policy Global Cities Index tend to designate London, New York and Tokyo most influential, followed by cities like Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Paris, Zurich, Chicago and Seoul. Cities in lower-income countries are disproportionately scarce among the top 25, which contrasts sharply with the nodes of global social movements.


The 2011 World Social Forum in Dakar. Source: Abdullah Vawda

Jennifer Robinson, Aihwa Ong and Ananya Roy criticize "global cities" rankings that concentrate on the development trajectories of relatively few cities in the highest-income countries. Such hierarchies dominate contemporary thinking on urbanization and shape policy in not-so-global cities, aimed at "catching up" with the command centers. Robinson's notion of "ordinary cities" highlights the unique histories, current situations and future possibilities of all urban areas. While not discounting the importance of examining global cities, this idea opens a much wider range of options for research and policy.


The 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai. Source: Claudio Riccio

Research on less-dominant cities often takes the form of local case studies with limited scope. Broader lateral networks, interactions and mutual experiences among them receive less attention. Robinson points to alternative globalization processes taking shape among ordinary cities and shaping their development paths. Migration patterns, criminal networks and religious movements, for example, forge new relationships between cities and exert considerable influence at local scales. In a similar way, the recent emergence and distribution of social forums has created an alternative urban constellation. The networks of activists meeting in ordinary cities of different sizes, cultures and regions prove that these places can be "global" in their own way.

René Boer (@rene_boer_) recently graduated from the University College London Urban Laboratory and currently works for Failed Architecture in Amsterdam.

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Suburban Transit Revolution

by Laurent Vermeersch

Paris is on the verge of a massive transportation upgrade, largely for the benefit of its long-neglected suburbs. The Boulevard Périphérique is currently a physical and psychological border between two unequal worlds. The 2.2 million residents of Paris intra-muros rarely set foot in the banlieue, home to a primarily lower-income and more ethnically diverse population of 9.5 million.

Defense of a ‘Cultural Factory’

by Cristiana Strava

The Casablanca art world has been up in arms since the Feb. 15 print edition of Al Ittihad announced that the city government planned to transform a popular cultural space into a parking lot.


Source: Nafas

The site of Casablanca's old slaughterhouses — known locally as "les abattoirs" or simply "l'batoir" — covers five hectares in the historically industrial neighborhood of Hay Mohammadi. Its buildings were designed by French architect Georges-Ernest Desmarest and completed in 1922. Abandoned 80 years later, the site became a rallying point for local artists and architects with ideas for its reuse. They attracted support from King Mohammed VI and managed to register the slaughterhouses on Morocco's heritage list in 2003. Artist Georges Rousse started a project in one of the buildings later that year, and multidisciplinary cultural events soon appeared.


Source: Cinéma-Maroc

In 2008, Casablanca officials collaborated with officials from Amsterdam on a series of workshops dedicated to connections between industry and culture. Mayor Mohamed Sajid later authorized the architectural preservation society Casamémoire to manage the slaughterhouses with local artists, and they formed the Cultural Factory at the Slaughterhouses Association. Yet despite the Cultural Factory's status as a national heritage site and world-renowned center for the arts, it remains a piece of underfunded city property at risk of ruin and redevelopment. Casamémoire has been trying unsuccessfully to renew its lease, and when government officials began parking on the grounds last month it appeared to indicate a plan to reclaim the space.


Source: Telquel

The arts community mobilized rapidly via online and offline networks. Within 24 hours a petition campaign amassed 1,200 signatures and a "Save L'Batoir" page appeared on Facebook. Blogs and online forums were abuzz with indignation, and young designers created signs for the growing protest movement.


Source: Mehdi Ayache

Authorities eventually issued a statement explaining that the vehicles were there as a temporary measure to deal with overflow in their parking lots. City Council Vice President Ahmed Brija assured everyone that the 260 cars would eventually be removed, and they disappeared within the next two weeks.

A protest stencil reads, "The slaughterhouse is not a parking lot." Source: Zied Ben Cheikh

Supporters of the cultural space are nevertheless on edge, and an "Occupy L'Battoir" movement has emerged to keep the slaughterhouses dedicated to the arts. Despite the massive show of support, Aadel Essaadani — current president of the Cultural Factory — maintains that a longterm solution will require stronger political and financial commitment from the city government.

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Heynen et al. on Urban Political Ecology

Keangnam Hanoi Landmark Tower in Hanoi’s new business district. Source: Melissa García Lamarca

“The central message that emerges from urban political ecology is a decidedly political one. To the extent that cities are produced through socio-ecological processes, attention has been paid to the political processes through which particular socio-environmental urban conditions are made and remade. From a progressive or emancipatory position, then, urban political ecology asks questions about who produced what kind of socio-ecological configurations for whom. In other words, urban political ecology is about formulating political projects that are radically democratic in terms of the organization of the processes through which the environments that we (humans and non-humans) inhabit become produced.


El Molino housing cooperative in Buenos Aires. Source: Melissa García Lamarca


A sign reads “self-management, collective property, mutual aid” in a toy-share space at El Molino. Source: Melissa García Lamarca

“As global/local forms of capitalism have become more entrenched in social life, there are still powerful tendencies to externalize nature. Yet the intricate and ultimately vulnerable dependence on capital accumulation on nature deepens and widens continuously. It is on the terrain of the urban that this accelerating metabolic transformation of nature becomes most visible, both in its physical form and its socio-ecological consequences.


Central Detroit, looking towards the GM Renaissance Center. Source: Melissa García Lamarca

“Urban political ecology research has begun to show that because of the underlying economic, political, and cultural processes inherent in the production of urban landscapes, urban change tends to be spatially differentiated, and highly uneven. Thus, in the context, of urban environmental change, it is likely that urban areas populated by marginalized residents will bear the brunt of negative environmental change, while other, affluent parts of cities enjoy growth in or increased quality of environmental resources. While this is in no way new, urban political ecology is starting to contribute to a better understanding of the interconnected processes that lead to uneven urban environments.”

— Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, 2006

This is part of the Polis collection of quotes related to cities.

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Will ‘EuroVegas’ Bring Prosperity to Madrid?

by Melissa García Lamarca



Alcorcón, a quiet suburb of Madrid, is poised to begin transforming into "EuroVegas" by the end of the year. The controversial project consists of hotels, conference space and entertainment around a replica of New York's Times Square. Last week, Las Vegas Sands Corp. — headed by Sheldon Adelson, the 14th richest person in the world — announced financing of $13.1 billion to begin construction, accompanied by flashy renderings of the planned development.





Madrid won the project over Barcelona in a heated competition last fall, and the site in Alcorcón was selected early this year. The development would include six casinos with 18,000 slot machines and 1,000 gambling tables, 12 hotels featuring a total of 36,000 rooms, a convention center, three golf courses, bars, restaurants and shopping centers on a 750-hectare site — all for a total of $35 billion.



The sky is literally the limit for EuroVegas. A "specially approved law" allegedly suspended height restrictions on buildings in the complex, one of many attempts by public officials to encourage Adelson to invest. Las Vegas Sands is to receive tax breaks on gambling revenue and property value as well as fee reductions on construction and infrastructure; there has also been talk of allowing smoking in some of the buildings despite a nationwide ban.





One of the major selling points is job creation, as Spain's unemployment rate hovers around 26 percent. Adelson claims that the project will generate over 250,000 jobs, which would reduce unemployment in Madrid by almost half. However, the actual quantity and quality of employment remain unverified. It is also unclear who would benefit, as public officials reportedly expressed openness to lifting restrictions on foreign workers to push down labor costs.


A protest banner reads "ANOTHER LIE. ANOTHER SCAM. NO EUROVEGAS." Source: El País

The protest group EuroVegas No questioned the development's potential benefits in a recent statement: "What guarantees do such supposed jobs have? Beyond these baseless claims, it is to be expected that EuroVegas is only beneficial for a privileged minority and will provoke irreversible environmental damage in the region." In light of popular frustration over neoliberal economic policy and corruption, the project will likely face continuing opposition from those who envision a different kind of prosperity for Greater Madrid.

Credits: Renderings are from EuroVegas Madrid.

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From City to Polis: Reflections from Heraklion, Greece

by Panayotis (Panos) Samartzis


Layers of history in Heraklion, on the island of Crete. Source: Panayotis (Panos) Samartzis

It is common in Greece to refer to the city of Heraklion as chaotic, perhaps due to its crowded streets and uncontrolled expansion. It is also a historical crossroads, where many different powers and everyday citizens have left their cultural imprints. As a result, Heraklion contains notably diverse and multilayered "realities" that offer each visitor a unique relationship with the city. Walking along the Venetian Walls from St. George Gate, one can encounter intersecting worlds in the urban fabric.



While visiting Heraklion, it occurred to me that we focus on and relate with different people, objects and situations in the city, as in life. We create our own story about the city, as in life. We decide if we'll move as strangers or as co-constructors in the city, as in life. Perhaps in shifting these relationships from a passive to an active mode, we can help the city become a polis.

Cornelius Castoriadis wrote perceptively about the role of philosophy, democracy and tragedy in the Greek polis. Philosophy and democracy emerged through critical and active participation in political life, while through tragedy people were "educated" in the results of hubris. This kind of education was of great importance for active citizens, reminding them of the need for self-control.

In the transformation from city to polis, a journey toward autonomous self-expression begins. A polis needs us to be free and responsible for the continuous creation of society. It rests upon our critical negotiation with the city's multiple realities, as well as self-control to allow these realities to coexist constructively.

In such a journey we are not alone. This blog, as well as other online (and offline) public spaces, can facilitate the networking of persons, ideas and actions for a better world.

Panayotis (Panos) Samartzis is a public servant in the Greek Ministry of Interior. His research is focused on citizen empowerment and participation in spatial planning.

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Stopping Evictions in Spain

by Melissa García Lamarca


Protest against evictions in Spain. Source: 20minutos

As Spain's unemployment rate climbs above 25 percent and its social welfare system is meticulously dismantled, around 500 eviction orders are issued each day. Banks are repossessing the homes of those who can’t meet their mortgage payments. This trend is sadly not new. There were more than 325,000 foreclosures between 2007 and 2011, according to Spain's justice department. A fellow Polis blogger explored who is to blame for evictions in Spain early last year. In this post, I look at how advocacy and grassroots groups, including Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and the housing groups from 15M assemblies, are working to stop and transform this process.


Platform of People Affected by Mortgages. Source: PAH

PAH was founded in February 2009 to defend the constitutional right to housing, stop evictions, enact social rent, and reform the Mortgage Act. The latter, as it exists now, gives banks the right to claim full payment of debt even after evicting the property's residents, including the difference in value and all legal costs. For example, María Carrión reported on a family that paid $98,000 of a $323,000 mortgage, but owed the bank an additional $405,000 even after it had taken back their apartment. The Act results in hundreds of thousands of families on the streets with a debt to repay for the rest of their lives.


PAH Stop Evictions Campaign in September 2011. Source: Esquerra Anticapitalista

Through PAH's Stop Evictions Campaign, members occupy and block entrance to properties where eviction orders are being delivered. The first successfully paralyzed eviction took place in November 2010 in Tarragona, Catalonia, where a judicial commission — made up of two government officials and a bank representative accompanied by Catalan police — decided not to force residents to abandon their house. This tactic has been used hundreds of times over by PAH and the groups who emerged during the 15M movement in May 2011. PAH has stopped hundreds of evictions, but in some cases the police succeed in prying people away one by one and then evicting the families inside.


Activists clash with police while trying to stop an eviction. Source: Estrella Digital

PAH and 15M have occupied foreclosed buildings to provide shelter for evicted families with nowhere to go. People are now doing the same on their own, as seen in Valdemoro, Madrid, where 50 families are occupying an empty chalet development. This is occurring across the country. In several cases, the interventions of PAH and local 15M housing groups have forced local governments to back down on evictions and provide emergency housing, as is the case in Getafe, Madrid.


Javier and Estrella outside a dwelling they're occupying in Valdemoro, Madrid. Source: 20minutos

Also in Madrid, PAH activists have carried out a variety of protests at Bankia — the bank nationalized and bailed out to a tune of $24 billion — to demand that they negotiate with families threatened with eviction. Bankia is responsible for 80 percent of home repossessions in the autonomous community of Madrid.


An October 2012 protest and occupation in front of Bankia's headquarters. Source: Cuartopoder

After years of pressure from PAH to reform the Mortgage Act, a spate of suicides late last year by people threatened with eviction finally pushed the government to take action. Yet the approved Royal Decree did not include any changes to the Mortgage Law, only allowing households under "extreme hardship" to have their eviction orders frozen for the next two years. To qualify they must have an annual income below $25,000 and pay more than half of this in mortgage payments. They must also meet at least one of a list of other strict conditions, such as owning no other property, being a single-parent household with at least two children, having a large family, having a family member with disabilities or being a victim of domestic violence. And coverage for qualifying households only begins for those facing foreclosure after the Royal Decree was adopted on Nov. 16, 2012, meaning that the 400,000 households that have already experienced foreclosure or eviction are left out.

PAH, 15M housing groups and other sympathizers are outraged, arguing that this token decree excludes the majority of people affected by foreclosures and evictions. They presented a Popular Legislative Initiative with over 700,000 signatures calling for regulation of foreclosure payments, social rent and a moratorium on foreclosure procedures. Public defenders across Spain were also up in arms last December, demanding that the government restructure mortgage debt, create a social housing fund and enact social rent. Today a communique from a European commission in Brussels outlined reasons why the reform will have limited impact.


Empty housing in Spain. Source: Madrilonia

Last week, the Association of Spanish Banks and the Spanish Confederation of Credit Unions ceded 6,000 dwellings to create a social housing fund for the evicted. Considering that 20 percent of Spain's total housing, amounting to 5.6 million dwellings, is empty because it hasn't been sold or was seized by banks, surely more can be done. The efforts of PAH, with chapters in over 80 cities across Spain, along with 15M housing groups and other activists, are critical in the fight to stop evictions and ensure access to affordable housing.

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Ending Assault on Women in Delhi and Beyond

by Min Li Chan


Source: The Atlantic

Women and men throughout India have been taking to the streets to express outrage at the savage gang rape and torture of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi on Dec. 16, which precipitated her death before the year's end.

This case has sparked public debate on confronting a history of sexual harassment and violence that plagues many Indian cities. As reported in the New York Times: "'That girl could have been any one of us,' said Sangeetha Saini, 44, who took her two teenage daughters to a candle-filled demonstration on Sunday in Delhi. Women in India 'face harassment in public spaces, streets, on buses,' she said."

The demonstrations in India open questions that resonate worldwide. Jasmeen Patheja sums up the challenges for cities:

Our cities will be safer when we acknowledge women as citizens. We must ask, 'Whose city?' Can we imagine a city of women? A city for women? We need to start looking at/designing/building the city as a place of women instead of focusing on protecting women — without perpetuating victimhood...

We, as women, are brought up around warnings: be careful; don't attract attention to yourself. We are taught to have a fear-based relationship with our city. Public places are not for leisure and pleasure. In my ideal city I want to be in a park and take a nap without feeling threatened. Sometimes we just love to sit, stand, walk and talk without looking available. What makes a group of boys play football on a field and not girls?

Patheja's questions evoke the shared experiences of women in many cities. In my hometown of Kuala Lumpur, malls have begun to designate "ladies only" safe zones in their sprawling underground parking garages, locating them close to entry and exit points for quick access. Local radio stations run public service announcements from time to time urging women to be alert and stay safe. In some cities, these urban design interventions are hardly new efforts — women-only subway cars were introduced in Tokyo nearly a decade ago to counter rising incidents of groping.

Sonia Faleiro contends that law enforcement agencies need vast improvement, especially since rape victims are often subjected to public shame:

Change is possible, but the police must document reports of rape and sexual assault, and investigations and court cases have to be fast-tracked and not left to linger for years. Of the more than 600 rape cases reported in Delhi in 2012, only one led to a conviction. If victims believe they will receive justice, they will be more willing to speak up. If potential rapists fear the consequences of their actions, they will not pluck women off the streets with impunity.

In response to the protests, India's Home Minister has pledged to "increase the number of buses at night, track those buses with GPS devices, ensure drivers carry identity badges and increase the number of police officers on busy routes."

Government intervention, redesign of public space and services, and effective law enforcement are certainly needed. But are they sufficient? Mitra Kalita links the assailment of women to the limitations of top-down intervention: "How will the government stop all that inappropriate touch that happens on its city buses every day? Or those hands that enter the sides of a rickshaw to just feel around? Or all those whistles and catcalls?"

As one protest placard from the Delhi protests reads, "We live in a society that teaches women not to get raped, instead of teaching men not to rape."

Fully addressing this problem may require a widespread change in consciousness. How does local culture — as honed at the grassroots level within families and communities — instill respect for women? How does the education system support this value? How does the powerful language of popular media, transcending barriers of literacy, portray women and promote gender equality? In our best efforts, women cannot be treated merely as concepts — we are mothers, grandmothers, cousins, sisters, daughters, friends and neighbors.

In many ways, India's public discourse following the tragedy is a moving testament to civil society and a breathtaking expression of the world's largest democracy at work. Let's hope it doesn't stop there.

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Governance is Key in Addressing Urban Poverty

by Brendan Halloran

One of the principal challenges of global urbanization is the improvement of living conditions in slums, or communities with insufficient infrastructure and land tenure. Ciudad Peronia, a large, diverse, predominantly low-income section of the Villa Nueva municipality just south of Guatemala City, is a striking example.


Ciudad Peronia. Source: Google Earth

Established in the early 1980s by people left homeless after a devastating earthquake, Peronia grew through successive waves of informal occupation and sale of formal plots. These development patterns gave rise to a patchwork of neighborhoods with different characteristics and living conditions.

Scholars increasingly agree that local institutions — particularly municipal governments — are essential to the substantial and sustainable reduction of urban poverty.* The relationship between low-income communities and municipal authorities is key to the efficacy of these institutions, as clearly evident in Ciudad Peronia.

The many different leaders I've spoken to in Peronia have been almost unanimous in declaring that the municipal government has done little or nothing to contribute to the community's development. The municipality has, in fact, invested resources in a handful of projects there in recent years, yet residents feel that it has not fulfilled its responsibility for addressing basic needs. There is a widespread sentiment that the city government rejects and ignores communities like Peronia.

The municipality has actually played a significant, if uneven, role in Peronia's development. The approach generally adopted by local authorities has been to contribute resources for projects such as street paving or school improvement while the neighborhood contributes labor. In other cases the municipality has contracted private businesses to carry out development projects, billing residents who benefit for half the cost. In only a few cases has the government carried out projects without any community contribution.


The edge of Ciudad Peronia. Photo: Jacobo Gramajo

Community leaders report that they have made repeated requests to local officials for assistance of various kinds and have been ignored. Municipal authorities have paid especially scant attention to Peronia's informal settlements, despite repeated petitions. However, they did carry out water, sewer and paving projects just prior to the recent elections. Some evidence suggests that projects have been chosen based on political gain rather than community needs.

Legal problems kept the longtime mayor off the ballot in the 2011 election, opening the door for a new administration that took office in Jan. 2012. The new mayor has promised to work in partnership with local communities. When he met with Peronia's representatives, he admonished them for coming to him with only a long list of needs. He claimed that he would break the mold of leadership in Guatemala by refusing to play the role of patriarchal chief who solves all problems, instead empowering communities to meet their needs in cooperation with local government.

The approach and language used by the mayor seemed an invitation to become partners in development. He solicited proposals and promised to facilitate solutions. The new administration supported several initiatives in Peronia, including a dental clinic and an adult education program, to be carried out with community labor and municipal resources.

Yet the mayor's approach has not been without challenges. He has told community organizations to present him with technical proposals to address local problems, yet few individuals or groups in poor areas have the technical know-how to produce such documents. The mayor has also championed community organization, saying that he will promote functional and representative development councils in each neighborhood. However, this organizational work has lagged behind physical projects, and municipal authorities have not demonstrated an understanding of the frayed social fabric that exists in many neighborhoods (a problem that the formation of development councils alone will not remedy).


Streets of Ciudad Peronia. Photo: Brendan Halloran

Nonetheless, the new administration has implemented practices never before seen in Peronia. The mayor assigned one member of the municipal council and one municipal department head to form a direct link with the community. These individuals have brought information about municipal plans and projects to community leaders, and have sought input with an openness never displayed by previous governments. Seven months into his administration, the mayor came to Peronia to carry out an exercise called Sueños Compartidos (Shared Dreams). Through this initiative, community leaders gathered to propose improvements in the community, discussing options and then voting on which ones to pursue.

The mayor clearly envisions a new relationship with local communities. Yet it is unclear whether improved communication and participatory planning constitute a true partnership that can fully address the causes and consequences of poverty in places like Ciudad Peronia.

Individual, community and government approaches to reducing urban poverty tend to overlap, at times operating in conjunction and at others operating independently or at cross purposes. One of the principal challenges faced by community residents is a lack of accountability in government institutions. This has produced a system in which some neighborhoods benefit while others are ignored, regardless of their needs. Resources are often used not as part of a comprehensive strategy to provide services and improve quality of life, but to generate political support prior to elections. It is extremely difficult for citizens to access municipal budget information that could help them hold authorities accountable. Furthermore, the lack of any forum for collectively voicing opinion has led to the isolation of neighborhoods and the groups representing them, despite common challenges.

In the case of Peronia, the most vulnerable communities are those without legal land titles. Government authorities have demonstrated a willingness to ignore their needs (for a decade and counting, in some cases), refusing to invest municipal resources and even rejecting petitions to connect to the private water system. Politicians, particularly the former mayor, have often used the issue of legal titles as a bargaining chip at election time, promising legalization in return for votes Again, the absence of a transparent procedure for handling legalization, or a space to organize communities facing this shared obstacle, has left these neighborhoods at the mercy of the political calculations of municipal authorities.

The complex relationships between local communities and government authorities condition the trajectory of urban development in Peronia and around the world. Transparent and inclusive governance is key to effectively and equitably addressing urban poverty. It should thus be a top priority for local and global development practitioners.

Brendan Halloran is a doctoral candidate in the Planning, Governance and Globalization program at Virginia Tech, and author of The Urban Citizen's View. He is also a Democracy and Governance Advisor for USAID in Guatemala. All views expressed in this article are his own, and do not represent the views of USAID.

* Examples include:

Desai, R. (2010) The Political Economy of Urban Poverty in Developing Countries: Theories, Issues, and an Agenda for Research. Brookings Institution Wolfenson Center for Development.

Hasan, A., Patel, S., and Satterthwaite, D. (2005) "How to Meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Urban Areas," Environment and Urbanization 17(1), 3-19.

Mitlin, D., and Satterthwaite, D. (eds.) (2004) Empowering Squatter Citizen: Local Government, Civil Society and Urban Poverty Reduction. Earthscan.

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