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"In the context of increasing division and segregation in cities across the world, along with pressing concerns around austerity, environmental degradation, homelessness, violence, and refugees, this book pursues a multidisciplinary approach to spatial justice in the city. Spatial justice has been central to urban theorists in various ways. Intimately connected to social justice, it is a term implicated in relations of power which concern the spatial distribution of resources, rights and materials. Arguably there can be no notion of social justice that is not spatial. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has argued that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies - human, natural, non-organic, technological - to occupy a certain space at a certain time. As such, urban planning and policy interventions are always, to some extent at least, about spatial justice. And, as cities become ever more unequal, it is crucial that urbanists address questions of spatial justice in the city. To this end, this book considers these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Crossing law, sociology, history, cultural studies and geography, the book's overarching concern with how to think spatial justice in the city brings a fresh perspective to issues that have concerned urbanists for several decades. The inclusion of empirical work in London brings the political, social, and cultural aspects of spatial justice to life"--

Chapter 1. City Water matters: Cultures, Practices and Entanglements of Urban Water: An Introduction -- Chapter 2. Public Water features: assembling publics, enlivening spaces, promoting regeneration -- Chapter 3. Consuming Water: habits, rituals and state interventions -- Chapter 4. River Powers: assembling publics, connections and materials in a global city -- Chapter 5. Embodied water entanglements: sex/gender, race/ethnicity and class urban practices of cleanliness and sanitation -- Chapter 6. Public waters: the passions, pleasures and politics of bathing in the city -- Chapter 7. Differentiating Water: Cultural Practices and Contestations -- Chapter 8. Water Traces in Urban Space -- Chapter 9. A Final Word

Some cities have grown into mega cities and some into uncontrolled sprawl; others have seen their centres decline with populations moving to the suburbs. In such times, questions of the public realm and public space in cities warrant even greater attention than previously received.Concerned with the borders and boundaries, constraints and limits on accepting, acknowledging and celebrating difference in public, Sophie Watson, through ethnographic studies, interrogates how difference is negotiated and performed. Focusing on spaces where to outside observers tension is relatively absent or invisi

This paper proposes new key ways to thinking about self-organisation in cities in what, I suggest, are increasingly unsettled and turbulent times. The importance of thinking about self-organisation in cities is all the more salient in the current economic and social context where in many parts of the world there is a withdrawal by the state from public involvement and expenditure, which is impacting on urban citizens, particularly those who are vulnerable, in increasing negative ways. Self-organisation is thus an important and key direction for the future, if cities are to remain inclusive, just and responsive to local needs. Yet such self-organisation can only be truly meaningful and effective if it is conducted collaboratively and democratically, involving as many people as possible, particularly those whose voices are not often heard. In so doing, it is also important to recognise that such involvement and democratic participation is not always consensual; rather conflict is inevitable and potentially positive, as people learnt to recognises their differences which are often implicated in power, and to negotiate solutions together.

The paper considers how shifting laundry practices and technologies associated with dirty washing have over time summoned different spaces, socialities and socio-spatial assemblages in the city, enrolling different actors and multiple publics and constituting different associations, networks and relations in its wake as it travels from the home and back again. It argues that rather than being an inert object of unpleasant matter, whose encounter with humans has been largely restricted to certain categories of person for its transformation to re-use, and thus passed unnoticed, the paper explores how laundry practices have figured in producing and reproducing gendered (and classed) relations of labour, and enacting multiple socio-spatial, and gendered, relations and assemblages in the city, which have largely gone unnoticed in accounts of everyday urban life.

This study explores the potentiality of markets as public space where multiple forms of sociality are enacted. Research was conducted in eight UK markets. The research revealed that markets represented a significant public and social space for different groups in the locality as a site for vibrant social encounters, for social inclusion and the care of others, for `rubbing along' and for mediating differences. The article concludes by arguing that the social encounters and connections found in markets contradict pessimistic accounts of the decline of social association, offering a contrast to the shopping mall and providing the possibility for the inclusion of marginalised groups and for the co-mingling of differences where these are increasingly relegated to more private spheres.

This paper draws on a series of detailed, qualitative interviews with senior British civil servants to explore the development and implementation of equal opportunity policy in the Civil Service. Introduced in the early 1980s, it was designed to reduce the importance attached to masculine traits in the recruitment and promotion of staff, including those on the fast track to senior positions. The paper concludes by arguing that career progression still depends heavily on giving the impression of being 'the right sort of chap', which itself embodies a set of attributes which happen to be more prevalent in men than in women.