Metropolitan rebellions and the politics of commoning the city. (March 2019) - Holston, James
This article analyzes the remarkable wave of metropolitan rebellions that inaugurated the 21st century around the world (2000–2016). It argues that they fuel an emergent politics of city-making in which residents consider the city as a collective social and material product that they produce; in effect, a commons. It investigates this politics at the intersection of processes of city-making, city-occupying, and rights-claiming that generate movements for insurgent urban citizenships. It develops a critique of the so-called post-political in anthropological theory, analyzes recent urban uprisings in Brazil and Turkey, distinguishes between protest and insurgent movements, evaluates digital communication technologies as a new means to common the city, and suggests what urban citizenship brings to politics that the national does not.