1st Edition
The City as the Southern Question Alternative Histories of Urbanisation After Gramsci
This innovative edited volume places global urbanism in the context of the phenomenal growth of cities of the South, investigating their colonial contentiousness and asking how their history plays out in the twenty-first-century phenomenon of urbanisation.
Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on the problem of the South, it shows that the question of southern urbanism is about the anomalies and growth of southern cities, the histories of struggles, technological and logistical reorientations, new zoning practices of neoliberal capitalism and the remaking of urban geographies towards a possible urban future that aims to be just. Crucially, it asks whether today’s city is a seamless formation of several overlapping phases of growth or if there is a decisive break today, marked by the hyper growth of these cities. To understand the implications of these questions for visions of an urban future, this volume takes a number of southern cities of Asia and Europe as case studies, including Kolkata, Mumbai, Chittagong, Beirut, Athens, Naples and Marseille. It shows how these cities are paradoxically marked by both fractured geographies and new types of popular mobilisations, solidarities and an ethic of protection and care, showing this to be the core of the Southern question, constituting the urban experience of our time.
It will appeal to advanced-level students and scholars with interests in urban sociology, Southern urbanisation, postcolonial studies, political science, political economy and urban geography.
Introduction: After Gramsci, City as the Southern Question
Ranabir Samaddar
A Southern City as Maximum City
1 Southern City and the Rent Question: Calcutta 1910s–1950s
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, Iman K. Mitra, and Kaustubh Mani Sengupta
2 Mumbai’s Southern Question and the Political Economy of Work and Space
Manish K. Jha and Mouleshri Vyas
3 A Port City to Portray the Image of a Country: The City of Chittagong, Bangladesh
Muhammad Faridul Alam
4 Mexico City’s Subaltern Spaces as the FIFA World Cup Arrives . . .
Jair Coronado Rosales and Julie-Anne Boudreau
B Expanding Urbanising Worlds
5 Organised Chaos or Induced Disorder? Reading Beirut through its Juxtapositions
Christine Mady
6 With Gramsci in the Park: Hegemonic Green Planning in Athens
George Kandylis, Penny Koutrolikou, and Fereniki Vatavali
7 Same but Different? Logistics Workers and Employment Conditions in the Mediterranean Port Cities of Naples and Marseille
Andrea Bottalico and Enrica Morlicchio
C Belonging and Alienation in a Southern City
8 Urban Creation or Fruitful Regeneration? What Is Marseilles’ Downtown?
Samuel S. Everett and Pierre Sintès
9 A Mediterranean Hub: Immigration and Religious Diversity in Marseilles
Jean Boutier and Arundhati Virmani
10 Buildings Communicate
Paolo Novak
11 Marginalised Places—Silenced Solidarities: An Autoethnographic Study on Refugees and Solidarity on Lesvos Prior to Summer 2015
Sevasti Trubeta
12 Commercial Sex Life as the Hidden Underbelly of the City and the Dirty History of Kolkata
Paula Banerjee, Sangbida Lahiri, and Rajat Kanti Sur
D Southern City in a Globalised World
13 From Financial Crisis to Refugee Crisis: Management and Resistance in Athens
Olga Lafazani and Thanasis Tyrovolas
14 The Southern City as a New Urban Frontier
Arnab Bhattacharya and Ugo Rossi
15 South of the South, the Kaohsiung Port City of Taiwan
Joyce C.H. Liu
16 A Living Southern Urbanism in South Africa
Yousuf Al-Bulushi
17 What Is the “South” in Southern City? An Epilogue
Niccolò Cuppini and Sandro Mezzadra
Biography
Ranabir Samaddar is Professor and Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies in the Calcutta Research Group, India, and a CIFAR Humanity’s Urban Future Program fellow.
Enrica Morlicchio is Professor of Economic Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and CIFAR Humanity’s Urban Future Fellow.
Sandro Mezzadra is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Bologna, Italy.
