Event Date: 4th March 2009
Speaker: Martina Reiker
Venue: Urban Design Research Institute
The transformation of the modernist city with its celebration of diversity into gated enclaves of the affluent and far away informal communities of the poor is a sine qua non of contemporary critical urban literature. Contemporary practices of visioning the urban are both embedded in and expand beyond the register of an earlier ‘rights to the city’ narrative. Drawing on research in Cairo, the first part of this paper examines ways in which these new urban mobilities re-articulate visions of the urban for the working poor. With modernist urban center no longer providing a productive analytic grid through which to understand practices of the city, the second part of the paper explores forms of connections, communications, exchanges and activisms that are being created within the temporal-spatial register of a very specific neo-liberal urban project.