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Urban Global Justice: The Rise of Human Rights Cities
Abstract
Cities increasingly base their local policies on human rights. Human rights cities promise to forge new alliances between urban actors and international organizations, to enable the 'translation' of the abstract language of human rights to the local level, and to develop new practices designed to bring about global urban justice. This book brings together academics and practitioners at the forefront of human rights cities and the 'right to the city' movement to critically discuss their history and also the potential that human rights cities hold for global urban justice.
The book introduces the reader to an emerging trend in law and social science, with up-to-date insights from prominent authors on the phenomenon of human rights cities. Its interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between human rights and cities makes this relevant to lawyers, sociologists, urban geographers and activists. The book provides a fresh set of perspectives and theories on the potential and pitfalls of global urban justice, but also abounds with examples of the implementation of human rights cities
... This chapter draws in part on the more extensive work of the author on the same subject in 'Towards a Sociology of the Human Rights City: Focusing on Practice ' (pp. 276-93), in: Barbara Oomen, Martha F. Davis and Michele Grigolo (2016). Global Urban Justice. ...
... Rachel Pennington, a barrister, holds an LLM in International Human Rights and Practice from the University of York. This contribution is a summary and update of the authors' chapter 'Human Rights Practice and the City: A Case Study of York (UK)' pp.[179][180][181][182][183][184][185][186][187][188][189][190][191][192][193][194][195][196][197][198], in: Barbara Oomen, Martha F.Davis and Michele Grigolo (2016). Global Urban Justice. ...
... Two Case Studies on the Freedom of Expression.' (pp. 199-219), in: Barbara Oomen, Martha F.Davis and Michele Grigolo (2016). Global Urban Justice. ...
... They observe further that the ascent of the Journal of Human Rights Practice challenges 'the assumption that law is the primary means through which we can understand human rights' (Banki et al. 2013: 320), recalling the journal editors' statement that 'the practical application of rights cannot be properly understood from a single disciplinary perspective' (Gready and Phillips 2009: 4). We agree that what is needed in an ever more complex, globalized world is 'an increasingly interdisciplinary understanding of human rights' (Banki et al. 2013: 320), approaching human rights praxis, as exemplified by Blau and Frezzo (2012), as processes of translation and vernacularization (Merry 1996) and urban practice (Gready 2019;Oomen et al. 2016). ...
... This fell under the fourth objective of the grant application. Reading and writing summaries of the literature on Human Rights Cities helped me envision what would be possible in Boston if the Human Rights City resolution was implemented (Oomen et al. 2016;White and Stevens 2014). ...
This article describes the experience and lessons learned by graduate students and supervising faculty in piloting an action-research project aimed at realizing positive economic and social change by advancing the vision of Boston as a human rights city that was articulated in a city council resolution adopted in 2011. It details the efforts led by the graduate students in their roles as paid outreach coordinators and research assistants to resuscitate the latent social movement that had resulted in the adoption of the Boston Human Rights City resolution. Against the backdrop of the Boston Human Rights City pilot project’s success at inspiring the re-establishment of the long-defunct city-level human rights commission, each of the graduate student leaders shares their reflections on and analysis of their experience of ‘learning by doing’. They detail the challenges they confronted and what key lessons were yielded by their trial and error. The article concludes with a summary of insights that readers (including the human rights commissioners) might find helpful with respect to both transdisciplinary human rights pedagogy in higher education, especially at the graduate level, and development of social movements, particularly in the advancement of the Human Rights Cities movement. The article therefore contributes to ongoing elucidation in the Journal of Human Rights Practice of what makes for effective human rights education—both in academic environments and in society more generally—outside of the prevalent disciplinary focus on law. Through the lens of the authors’ example of the direct, hands-on experience provided to students by the project, the article invites deeper engagement with transdisciplinary experiential learning as human rights education praxis that aims to reach members of local communities outside the classroom by creating a city-level culture of valuing, protecting and promoting economic and social rights.
While the political architecture of ‘sustainable urbanism’ is constantly changing and evolving, some fundamental questions regarding the relationships between cities and the natural environment stand out: How are they conceptualized? To what extent are cities part of nature and what nevertheless differentiates them from nature? What are the normative and political implications of these relationships? Scholars offer varying responses, yet most share an opposition to city-nature dualism, which sees the relationship as oppositional and antithetical: The city is not part of nature and vice versa. While the dualistic standpoint entails inherent contradictions, its philosophical opposition, namely monism, also collapses. Monism and conceptions of the ‘natural city’ regard cities as natural entities and nature as a higher moral order from which urban models ought to be derived. These two positions are analyzed and critiqued in the second section. The subsequent section focuses on two aspects of hybrid, socio-natural conceptions of city-nature relationships that highlight axiological and political challenges posed by urban sustainability. The chapter concludes by suggesting that civic ecologism, i.e., city-based politics of urban sustainability, offers fertile ground for addressing the normative and political implications raised in the analyses.
Looking at current theoretical approaches to democracy and the city, this article deepens our understanding of the democratic relevance of cities. It suggests four ideals of the democratic city which are labelled the city as a school of democracy, the urban cosmopolis, the city as a commons and the sustainable city. Tracing commonalities between the ideals, while avoiding their pitfalls, the article develops an argument for understanding the democratic promise of the city by linking John Dewey’s concept of democratic action as experimental problem-solving to the spatiality of the city. Building on Dewey, the article introduces the concept of urban experimentalism and points out prospects for a spatialized understanding of democracy and pathways for democratizing urban space.
This article deals with a new development in the field of implementation and protection of human rights: the Human Rights Cities. The paper seeks to answer the research question, whether this development occurs also in Poland. To answer this question, an empirical study was conducted with the participation of 40 Polish cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. This study enables to categorized Polish cities, that were subject of the study, according to their level of involvement in the implementation of human rights. The leading local Polish governments, which can be labeled as a human rights cities, were identified. These cities account for nearly a third of the cities surveyed.
Within the framework of Mediterranean migration studies and as a contribution to the emerging debate on the ‘local turn’, and on multiscalar approaches of region-making from different disciplines, the main objective of this article is to analyse an empirical trend that theoretically reinforces the view that cities can shape new regional domains. This city-region interface delimits the article’s two-sided argument. On one hand, the article argues that because of the increase of trans-Mediterranean relations, cities are contributing to regional-making; and, on the other hand, that this occurs through a critical process of State disengagement from the way in which the Mediterranean is configured today. After arguing for a Braudelian view of the Mediterranean as région de villes, the article conceptualizes the category of ‘regional cities’ within current geographical and international relations literature. Drawing on three examples of external city practices (city-to-city networks, city involvement in international non-governmental organization and city bilateral diplomacy with other cities), the article empirically illustrates, as a third step, the relevant different functionalities of the city that shape region-making. Finally, the article sets this empirical and theoretical focus within current European Union and State-based geo-migration politics as a top-down region-making failure. The purpose is to highlight the dissonance between the top-down region-making blockage and the historical bottom-up construct of the Mediterranean as a region of interconnected cities. This invites us to visualize regional cities as the basic component for a paradigm shift in Mediterranean migration governance.
This chapter focuses on the relevance of multi-level urban politics to the emergence and consolidation of human rights cities. It argues that intergovernmental conflicts within the state – between national and subnational levels of government in particular – can play a determinant role in the process of becoming and being a human rights city. To substantiate this claim, the chapter presents evidence from a qualitative case study of Bologna: a city that has explicitly engaged with the adoption, institutionalisation, and implementation of human rights in recent years. The analysis demonstrates that Bologna’s transformation into a human rights city can be largely interpreted as a reactive process triggered by migration governance changes at the national level. In this process, human rights were instrumentally used for the construction and defence of an idea of justice aligned with the priorities of the local government and its civil society partners in relation to the presence and integration of immigrants. In light of this finding, the chapter discusses the added value of human rights as law, practice, and discourse to developing strategic local responses to conflicts with higher levels of government. In addition, it highlights the need to move beyond the global-local nexus in analyses of urban politics of human rights, and fully account for the role of intergovernmental relations within the state in moulding human rights city experiences. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research on the potential consequences of instrumentalising human rights to advance local political agendas within and beyond the field of migration governance.
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