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City-making from below: A call for communities of resistance and reconstruction


Stephan de Beer
Mark Oranje

Abstract

This article laments the exclusion of small, local communities, voices and visions, from participating in making the city. It makes a case  for ‘small communities’ practising resistance and reconstruction in multiple ways and places. Instead of viewing such actions as naïve or a-political, it calls for an understanding of such practices as alternatives to ‘top-down’ urban processes, and, as such, representing a different and necessary, critical political imagination. In doing so, it fuses insights from equity planning theories, praxis-based liberation theological approaches, and emancipatory community development approaches. It argues that communities, aware of the forces that would seek to tear them apart, can play a significant role in making cities ‘from below’. This, it is argued, would be even more possible through such communities finding each other, and nurturing deep solidarities, until broad-based, interconnected movements take shape, embodying concrete signs of wholeness.


Keywords: Equity planning, political imagination, reconstruction, resistance


Journal Identifiers


eISSN: 2415-0495
print ISSN: 1012-280X