DUS · Dissent and Urban Spaces

Dissent and Urban Spaces

What makes citizens choose a particular mode of protest? This project discusses looks at the way groups protest by initiating innovative strategies and tactics, and by creating new terrains of opposition. This project contends that national agencies and authorities, responding to protest actions with violence, could benefit from a closer examination and understanding of contemporary forms of dissent. As a whole, the research offers an interdisciplinary analysis of urban spaces and protests, with a focus on the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Enriching the discourse about the relationships between dissent and public space, it offers a window into how people use, manipulate, claim, and appropriate urban space while advocating for their own values. Thus far, we have no coherent theory explaining the relationship between space and contentious politics. We do have significant empirical and theoretical accounts of how prevailing forms of popular struggle vary and change from one political regime to another, but there is little written about the spatial physicality of these struggles. Seeking to further understand the phenomena of dissent, the research builds an analytical, interdisciplinary framework for the spatial physicality of dissent and advances a comparative display of forms of citizenship and cultural identities. Analysing dissent in 12 cities worldwide, with a focus on groups’ strategies, actions' scales (global, national and local), and key principles of action (e.g. difference, decentralization, multiplicity and informal order), the research offer new perspectives on how different and changing notions and practices of citizenship relate to issues in our multicultural society. As a whole, the analysis suggest that contemporary mode of action is not particular, and could be found, with modifications, in different contemporary actions worldwide in both democratic and non-democratic regimes. For further reading: Urban Design & Civil Protest (official website) http://designprotest.tau.ac.il/ Designing Protests in Urban Public Space, by Tali Hatuka, Sep. 2011 http://www.metropolitiques.eu/Designing-Protests-in-Urban-Public.html Designing a City for Safe Protests, an interview with Tali Hatuka, Feb. 2011 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-02/afot-dac022311.php Global protest grows as citizens lose faith in politics and the state, Peter Beaumont, The Observer, June 22, 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/22/urban-protest-changing-global-social-network

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