Struggle For The City

With an official population approaching fifteen million, Karachi is one of the largest cities in the world. It is also the most violent. Since the mid-1980s, it has endured endemic political conflict and criminal violence, which revolve around control of the city and its resources (votes, land and bhatta-"protection" money). These struggles for the city have become ethnicized. Karachi, often referred to as a "Pakistan in miniature," has become increasingly fragmented, socially as well as territorially. Despite this chronic state of urban political warfare, Karachi is the cornerstone of the economy of Pakistan. Gayer's book is an attempt to elucidate this conundrum. Against journalistic accounts describing Karachi as chaotic and ungovernable, he argues that there is indeed order of a kind in the city's permanent civil war. Far from being entropic, Karachi's polity is predicated upon organisational, interpretative and pragmatic routines that have made violence "manageable" for its populations. Whether such "ordered disorder" is viable in the long term remains to be seen, but for now Karachi works despite-and sometimes through-violence.

Articles, historical aspects of the urban area working class, partic. Migrant workers and labour policy in Africa - discusses the rise of capitalism and proletarianization, discipline, and forced labour of Black workers under criminal law in South Africa R and Mozambique, scientific management in Ghana gold mines, prostitution in Kenya, the informal sector in Senegal, rural migration in South Africa, etc. Diagrams, maps, references.

“We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.

From the founding of New Amsterdam until today, working people have helped create and re-create the City of New York through their struggles. Starting with artisans and slaves in colonial New York and ranging all the way to twenty-first-century gig-economy workers, this book tells the story of New York’s labor history anew. City of Workers, City of Struggle brings together essays by leading historians of New York and a wealth of illustrations, offering rich descriptions of work, daily life, and political struggle. It recounts how workers have developed formal and informal groups not only to advance their own interests but also to pursue a vision of what the city should be like and whom it should be for. The book goes beyond the largely white, male wage workers in mainstream labor organizations who have dominated the history of labor movements to look at enslaved people, indentured servants, domestic workers, sex workers, day laborers, and others who have had to fight not only their masters and employers but also labor groups that often excluded them. Through their stories—how they fought for inclusion or developed their own ways to advance—it recenters labor history for contemporary struggles. City of Workers, City of Struggle offers the definitive account of the four-hundred-year history of efforts by New York workers to improve their lives and their communities. In association with the exhibition City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York at the Museum of the City of New York

Manifesto on the urban commons from the acclaimed theorist.

A City Mismanaged traces the collapse of good governance in Hong Kong, explains its causes, and exposes the damaging impact on the community’s quality of life. Leo Goodstadt argues that the current well-being and future survival of Hong Kong have been threatened by disastrous policy decisions made by chief executives and their principal officials. Individual chapters look at the most shocking examples of mismanagement: the government’s refusal to implement the Basic Law in full; official reluctance to halt the large-scale dilapidation of private sector homes into accommodation unfit for habitation; and ministerial toleration of the rise of new slums. Mismanagement of economic relations with Mainland China is shown to have created severe business losses. Goodstadt’s riveting investigations include extensive scandals in the post-secondary education sector and how lives are at risk because of the inadequate staff levels and limited funding allocated to key government departments. This book offers a unique and very powerful account of Hong Kong’s struggle to survive. ‘Goodstadt demonstrates how the neglect of social rights in managing the SAR has brought about serious consequences through the discussion of housing, medical services, and education. A highly readable title with a lot of interesting arguments for those who really care about Hong Kong.’ —Lui Tai-lok, Department of Asian and Policy Studies, Education University of Hong Kong ‘Goodstadt gives a well-grounded and relentless rebuke of the HKSAR government for failing to safeguard lives, quality of living and the interests of its people in the past twenty years. It is a poignant siren that calls for reflection and correction.’ —Christine M. S. Fang, Department of Social Work and Social Administration, The University of Hong Kong ‘Goodstadt utilizes his long experience in public policy in Hong Kong to interpret the city’s mismanagement. He supplies a devastating critique of the fallacy of the approach taken by the Chief Executives and the senior leaders.’ —David R. Meyer, Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis

In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African

"With this rich account of its community and labor struggles, the city of angels—and apocalypse—becomes the city of hope."—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America "This wonderful book, with its evocations of LA's alternative histories, and its bold templates for social and environmental justice, is proof that the American Left is alive and well, especially in Southern California."—Mike Davis, author of Dead Cities "A rare book combining history, analysis, strategy and a platform – and it may well be carried out in this decade."—Tom Hayden, former State Senator, Los Angeles