At times of triumphant neo-liberalism cities increasingly become objects of financial speculation. Formally, social and political rights might not be abolished, yet factually they have become inaccessible for large parts of the population. The contributions gathered in this volume shed light on the clash between the perspectives of restructuring and reordering urban environments in the interest of investors and the manifold and innovative agencies of resistance that claim and stand up for the rights of urban citizenship. Renewed waves of urban transformation employ state coercion to foster the expulsion of poor and marginalised inhabitants from those urban spaces that attract interest from speculators. The intervention of state agencies triggers the work of hegemonic culture for reframing the housing issue and implementing moral and political legitimation, as well as legislation that restricts urban citizenship rights. The case studies of the volume comparatively show the different and sometimes contradictory patterns of these conflicts in Berlin, Sydney, Belfast, Jerusalem, Amsterdam, and İstanbul as well as in metropoles of Latin America and China. Innovative resistance agencies emerge that paint possible paths for the re-establishment of the right to the city as the core of urban citizenship.
Bryan S. Turner is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Religion Politics and Society at the Australian Catholic University, Honorary Professor and Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity at Potsdam University, Germany, and Emeritus Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York City. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology. He edited the Blackwell Wiley Encyclopedia for Social Theory (2018). He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Cambridge University in 2009 and received the Max Planck Award in social science in 2015.
Hannah Wolf is a researcher and lecturer completing her PhD at the University of Potsdam, coordinator of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity and associate member at the collaborative DFG-research centre Re-Figuration of Spaces (TU Berlin). Her academic background includes theatre and media studies, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. Her research interests lie in the political and moral economies of housing and home, citizenship, urban sociology, and the sociology of everyday life.
Gregor Fitzi is co-director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity at the University of Potsdam, Germany. After his PhD in Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, he was Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Among his recent publications are The challenge of modernity. Simmel’s sociological theory (2019) and Populism and the Crisis of democracy (2019), 3 vols. edited with Jürgen Mackert and Bryan S. Turner.
Jürgen Mackert is Professor of Sociology and a co-director of the Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Pluralism at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests lie in the sociology of citizenship, political economy, closure theory, (neo-)liberalism, settler colonialism, and de-democratisation. His most recent publication is Populism and the crisis of democracy (2019), 3 vols., edited with Gregor Fitzi and Bryan S. Turner (2019).
