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Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizens discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240,000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. In this work of creative non-fiction, scholar-activist and Nine Dots Prize winner Joanna Kusiak tells the story of a grassroots movement that convinced a million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble. She offers a vision of urban housing as democratically held commons, legally managed by a radically new institutional model that works through democratic conflicts. Moving between interdisciplinary analysis and her own personal story, Kusiak connects the dots between the past and the present, the local and the global, and shows the potential of radically legal politics as a means of strengthening our democracies and reviving the rule of law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Warsaw is one of the most dynamically developing cities in Europe, and its rich history has marked it as an epicenter of many modes of urbanism: Tzarist, modernist, socialist, and--in the past two decades--aggressively neoliberal. Focusing on Warsaw after 1990, this volume explores the interplay between Warsaw's past urban identities and the intense urban change of the '90s and '00s. Chasing Warsaw departs from the typical narratives of post-socialist cities in Eastern Europe by contextualizing Warsaw's unique transformation in terms of both global change and the shifting geographies of centrality and marginality in contemporary Poland.
In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism—illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history "Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In fact, Eastern Europe is a place that barely exists at all, except in cultural ...
Europe remains divided between east and west, with differences caused and worsened by uneven economic and political development. Amid these divisions, the environment has become a key battleground. The condition and sustainability of environmental resources are interlinked with systems of governance and power, from local to EU levels. Key challenges in the eastern European region today include increasingly authoritarian forms of government that threaten the operations and very existence of civil society groups; the importation of locally-contested conservation and environmental programmes that were designed elsewhere; and a resurgence in cultural nationalism that prescribes and normalises ex...
"Why do we think about some practices as work, and not others? Why do we classify certain capacities as economically valuable skills, and others as innate characteristics? What, moreover, is the role of law in shaping our answers to these questions?" These are just some of the queries explored by Zoe Adams's analysis of the legal construction, and regulation, of work. Spanning from the 14th century to the present day, The Legal Concept of Work explores how the role of law and legal concepts comes to consider some forms of human labour as work, and some forms of human labour as non-work. It examines why perceptions of these activities can change over time, and how legal constitution impacts the way in which work comes to be regulated, organised, and valued. As part of the analysis, the book presents a series of case studies, ranging from the publishing industry, academia, medicine, and retail, with a view of illustrating some of the regulatory challenges different types of work face, in the context of capitalism.
In the last twenty-five years, the explosive rise of car mobility has transformed street life in postsocialist cities. Whereas previously the social fabric of these cities ran on socialist modes of mobility, they are now overtaken by a culture of privately owned cars. If Cars Could Walk uses ethnographic cases studies documenting these changes in terms of street interaction, vehicles used, and the parameters of speed, maneuverability, and cultural and symbolic values. The altered reality of people’s movements, replacing public transport, bicycles and other former ‘socialist’ modes of mobility with privatized mobility reflect an evolving political and cultural imagination, which in turn shapes their current political reality.
A study of urban nature that draws together different strands of urban ecology as well as insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought. Postindustrial transitions and changing cultures of nature have produced an unprecedented degree of fascination with urban biodiversity. The “other nature” that flourishes in marginal urban spaces, at one remove from the controlled contours of metropolitan nature, is not the poor relation of rural flora and fauna. Indeed, these islands of biodiversity underline the porosity of the distinction between urban and rural. In Natura Urbana, Matthew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity, through the le...
Feminism as the bulwark against fascism In this exciting, innovative work, Polish feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska proposes a specifically feminist politics of antifascism. Mixing theoretical discussion with engaging reflections on personal experiences, Majewska proposes what she calls “counterpublics of the common” and “weak resistance,” offering an alternative to heroic forms of subjectivity produced by neoliberal capitalism and contemporary fascism.
A fascinating account of the growing "Yes in My Backyard" urban movement The exorbitant costs of urban housing and the widening gap in income inequality are fueling a combative new movement in cities around the world. A growing number of influential activists aren’t waiting for new public housing to be built. Instead, they’re calling for more construction and denser cities in order to increase affordability. Yes to the City offers an in-depth look at the “Yes in My Backyard” (YIMBY) movement. From its origins in San Francisco to its current cadre of activists pushing for new apartment towers in places like Boulder, Austin, and London, Max Holleran explores how urban density, once mal...
»The Machine in the Garden« gilt als Gründungstext der Amerikastudien als wissenschaftliche Disziplin. Die Beiträger des Sammelbands unterziehen das dort proklamierte Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Natur und Technik einer Relektüre. Sie untersuchen industrielle, bürokratische und digitale »Gärten« in Film und Literatur und beleuchten deren Funktion vor verschiedenen kulturhistorischen Hintergründen.