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Mass mobilizations by historically marginalized citizens of Bolivia have radically reconfigured the country's social and political landscape in the last decade. Their protests, struggles, and eventual ascent to state power have demanded new state-society relations that challenge "modern" forms of propertied citizenship and representative democracy. Among the principal actors in these transformations are the urban poor who live in precarious, informal areas at the edges of cities, known as "periurban" areas. Such areas are now home to between 40 and 60 percent of the urban population of Latin America. According to United Nations studies, a billion people now live in peripheral urban areas in developing countries, and their number will continue to grow by 25 million a year. What does this tremendous demographic shift mean in the context of rising social demands for equality and democracy?This dissertation explores possibilities and challenges for the contemporary construction of more equitable cities and political communities, through a focus on its most marginalized sectors. It is based on research in periurban neighborhoods of Cochabamba, Bolivia, which I analyze in the context of rapidly evolving state-civil society relations in Bolivia, and in Latin America more generally. The study explores the daily practices - as shaped by the social institutions of property, resource management and political participation - that reconstruct and reformulate political identities over time. This project, thus, focuses on contemporary forms of belonging that have emerged as a result of and a response to the structures of exclusion that persist despite national and institutionalized participatory projects. In particular, I seek to understand the role that contemporary state-directed institutions play in producing collective political subjects who struggle over legitimate definitions of property, access to resources and legitimacy. These institutions encourage certain logics, practices and political subjectivities over others, concurrently promoting particular forms of social and political relations. I am particularly interested in the ways that the institutionalized distinctions between the formal and informal, the lived distinctions between included and excluded, and the subjective distinctions between center and the periphery define different periurban collective perspectives. These distinctions produce the city and the state as central and determinant structures that seem to exist apart from, and shape the lives of, peripheral actors. Following Timothy Mitchell's (1998) compelling definition of the "state effect," in which such distinctions are embedded in institutions, bureaucracies and practices and help to maintain a given political and economic order, my dissertation explores the "city effect." This approach highlights the ways in which the powers of the city and the state do not lie in their inviolable permanence, but rather in the institutions that stabilize their permanence. Urban and governmental institutions shape daily practices and naturalize conceptual distinctions and categories. These conceptions imply a model of liberal inclusion that reinforces inequalities by depoliticizing subject positions as it obscures the inherently political constitution of social subjects. I focus, particularly, on the formation of collective logics and political subjects in neighborhoods in peripheral urban areas of Bolivia's growing cities, which have become important spaces in the socio-political transformations in the country. By looking at the power of dominant institutions that shape Bolivian cities, as well as challenges to their exclusionary mechanisms, I seek to better understand the nation's and the region's contemporary transformations. Periurban residents' collective forms and practices, forged at the crossroads of the city's institutional mechanisms and their own recombinant collective capacities, point to alternative visions of development and state-society relations. The very liminality of peripheral social forms and practices questions the legitimacy of the urban and state structures that marginalize them.

"Building on three decades of comparative research on marginality, ethnicity, and penality in the postindustrial metropolis, Loïc Wacquant offers a novel interpretation of Pierre Bourdieu as urban theorist. He invites us to explore the city through what he calls the trialectic of symbolic space (the mental categories through which we perceive and organize the world), social space (the distribution of capital in its different forms), and physical space (the built environment). On this reading, Bourdieu's topological sociology gives us the tools both to energize and also to challenge the canon of urban studies and to redraw their theoretical landscape. Compact and incisive, Bourdieu in the City will be of interest to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, geography, urban studies, urban planning, architecture, and social theory."--publisher.

"Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities-human and nonhuman-that make up the material politics of city making. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how these actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways"--

Biographical note: Regula Valérie Burri (Prof. Dr.) ist Professorin für Wissenschafts- und Technikkulturen an der HafenCity Universität Hamburg. Kerstin Evert (Dr.) ist Tanzwissenschaftlerin und leitet das Choreographische Zentrum K3 | Tanzplan Hamburg. Sibylle Peters (Dr. habil.) ist Kulturwissenschaftlerin und Performancekünstlerin und leitet das Forschungstheaterprogramm im Fundus Theater Hamburg. Esther Pilkington (PhD) ist Performancemacherin und -forscherin und arbeitet als PostDoc am künstlerisch-wissenschaflichen Graduiertenkolleg der HafenCity Universität Hamburg. Gesa Ziemer (Prof. Dr.) ist Professorin für Kulturtheorie und Vizepräsidentin Forschung der HafenCity Universität Hamburg.

In Being Interdisciplinary, Alan Wilson draws on five decades as a leading figure in urban science to set out a systems approach to interdisciplinarity for those conducting research in this and other fields. He argues that most research is interdisciplinary at base, and that a systems perspective is particularly appropriate for collaboration because it fosters an outlook that sees beyond disciplines. There is a more subtle thread, too. A systems approach enables researchers to identify the game-changers of the past as a basis for thinking outside convention, for learning how to do something new and how to be ambitious, in a nutshell how to be creative. Ultimately, the ideas presented address how to do research. Building on this systems focus, the book first establishes the basics of interdisciplinarity. Then, by drawing on the author's experience of doing interdisciplinary research, and working from his personal toolkit, it offers general principles and a framework from which researchers can build their own interdisciplinary toolkit, with elements ranging from explorations of game-changers in research to superconcepts. In the last section, the book tackles questions of managing and organising research from individual to institutional scales. Alan Wilson deploys his wide experience – researcher in urban science, university professor and vice-chancellor, civil servant and institute director – to build the narrative. While his experience in urban science provides the illustrations, the principles apply across many research fields.

The university, the city, and land : context and introduction / David C. Perry and Wim Wiewel -- The university of Helsinki as a developer / Anne Haila -- From conversion to cash cow? The University of Lüneburg, Germany / Katrin B. Anacker and Uwe Altrock -- Varsity real estate in Scotland : new visions for town and gown? / Deborah Peel -- Toward downtown : spatial growth and university location in the Tokyo metropolitan area / Yuichi Takeuchi -- Mexico City and university city : a story of struggle for autonomy through land / Carlos Morales Schechinger and Sara García Jiménez -- Partnering with private corporations to build on campus : Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea / GwangYa Han and Wann Yu -- Urban and real estate development of the Central University of Venezuela's rental zone / Abner J. Colmenares -- Development of the Jatinangor University area, Indonesia : growth problems and local responses / Wilmar Salim -- The University of Oporto and the process of urban change : an ambiguous relationship / Isabel Breda-Vázquez, Paulo Conceição, and Sónia Alves -- Academic fortress : the case of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem / Haim Yacobi -- Interface between academy and community in contested space : the difficult dialogue / Frank Gaffikin -- The university, the city, and the state : institutional entrepreneurship or instrumentality of the state? / Wim Wiewel and David C. Perry

The Occupy Movement represents the evolving nature of contemporary social movements. It employs traditional tactics as well as new tools of technology and alternative forms of organizing to articulate concerns. In an era of widening income inequality, record corporate profits, and government austerity measures, Occupy protestors claimed urban public spaces as sites of resistance this past year. By framing their cause as one driven by "the 99%", corporate interests were successfully linked to a diverse set of economic impacts that united the masses, from diminishing prospects of employment to record foreclosures and crippling student debt. In claiming their right to the city, Occupiers created physical and political space for reasserting the power of the people. Occupiers' seizing of public spaces and use of social media to promote and report acts of resistance suggest that in mediated societies, protests configured for virtual audiences are likely to become mainstays of urban social movements. The Occupy Movement embodies these developments and underscores the need for new thinking on how public spaces can facilitate participatory democracy. Using scholarly blogs and news reports, this paper tracks the movement and explores its implications on the governance of public space and the future of urban protests.