Urban Capitalist Articulations

Urban political economy considers the power of capital to reconfigure land and labor through political control. Across global contexts, a vast literature traces the ways that global capitalism makes and transforms cities over time through processes of investment, extraction, and accumulation by dispossession. Yet these processes are variably articulated--which is to say, they are joined with and expressed through specific social structures and positions. Whether race in the Americas or South Africa, caste in South Asia, or ethnic and religious groups, capitalist city-making is at once enabled by and potentially contested through group formation processes that precede and/or exceed those of class. This panel draws on the concept of articulation (Hall 1980, Hart 2007, Levenson 2023) to address the processes through which capitalist structures are, or have been, joined with other social formations to produce particular city-building coalitions and initiatives. Papers will also consider the ways that capitalist development is expressed politically, through forms of opposition and resistance. Through cases traversing contexts and time periods, the panel advances a global approach to analyzing racialized, casted, and ethnicized capitalist city building--and how those very structures might offer alternative visions.

References

Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance.” Selected Writings on Race and Difference 195–245.

Hart, Gillian. 2007. “Changing Concepts of Articulation.” Review of African Political Economy 34(111):85–101.

Levenson, Zachary. 2023. “Make ‘Articulation’ Gramscian Again.” Pp. 187–216 in Ethnographies of Power.

Session Organizer:

Dana KORNBERG, UC-Santa Barbara, USA, kornberg@ucsb.edu

See more of: RC21 Regional and Urban Development
See more of: RC02 Economy and Society
See more of: RC05 Racism, Nationalism, Indigeneity and Ethnicity
See more of: RC16 Sociological Theory
See more of: RC18 Political Sociology
See more of: RC20 Comparative Sociology
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