Urban Revanchism

Although planned as the " City of Tomorrow " , the Bijlmer district in Amsterdam quickly became the quintessential symbol of urban decline. Today, even with half of the planned renewal of the Bijlmer completed, the alleged success of this urban revitalisation programme is questionable. Parts of the black middle class did not move out and some are even returning to the Bijlmer; the combination is producing a type of " black gentrification " , which forces the " undesirables " like drug users, homeless people and undocumented immigrants to leave. This revanchist renewal not only benefits the middle and lower-class population of the district, but it also serves the interests of private developers. European revanchism makes the city safe for corporate investment and aims to restore social order as well as stimulating the development of a strong middle class. This paper demonstrates how hard revanchist policies are demanded not only by private developers but also by the middle and lower classes, and they exist alongside soft " caring " policies, even for the " undesirables " . 
Keywords: revanchism, urban revitalisation, gentrification, Amsterdam, black middle class, homeless people, modernist urban planning, undesirables, drug use, public space, high-rise flats

A dissertação trata da compreensão de semelhanças e singularidades do processo de exclusão social na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, tendo a região da Lapa como estudo de caso. A abordagem faz o recorte temporal a partir do início do discurso de higienismo, datado de 1850, passando pelas demolições das décadas de 1960 e 1970, e o processo de gentrificação a partir da década de 2000. A crítica à produção de cidade e às desigualdades presentes no modo de produção capitalista é o ponto central desta dissertação, sabendo que desde a metade do século XIX, é que se operam as transformações urbanas na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. A análise do processo de exclusão social e de como o sistema capitalista se beneficia dele, se dá pela comparação entre os discursos institucionais e midiáticos, identificando as semelhanças e singularidades dos processos de transformações urbanas que aconteceram na região central do Rio de Janeiro, mais especificamente, na região da Lapa. O processo de produção das cidades está associado à forma e às condições de articulação dos modos de produção. Assim, para que haja a exclusão social, é necessário e fundamental que haja a desigualdade característica do modo de produção capitalista. Essas desigualdades estão expressas na paisagem urbana, onde o movimento de pessoas em situação de fragilidade econômica é fator crucial para este processo de caráter classista. Desta forma, o espaço urbano é objeto fundamental e, sob a mirada da acumulação capitalista, passa a ser reproduzido sob sua lógica excludente.

In 2018, the Delhi High Court held that certain provisions of the state’s anti- begging law were unconstitutional. Nevertheless, such laws continue to operate in at least 20 other Indian states and union territories even today. Begging as a social phenomenon remains an under-researched subject within the social sciences, especially in India where the rare mention that the subject finds often gets subsumed within larger debates on chronic poverty or organised crime. This article begins by tracing the history of regulations around begging, followed by a discussion on the persistence of both begging and anti-begging laws prevalent today. By examining the justification underlying the criminalisation of begging, it contends that such an approach fails to provide insight into the lived experiences of individuals engaged in this activity. It therefore proposes that the analyses of begging in the Indian context adopt symbolic interactionism that lends its rich theoretical framework to enable an interpretation of the act as one of agency; a survival strategy among those living on the margins of the neoliberal urban experience. In doing so, it posits a view of the beggar as a powerful political symbol with the potential to subvert and interrogate the rules of the game in a globalised world.

Gentrification is a security project. Though this claim is not new, existing scholarship on contemporary urban (in)security in the Global North, especially in the context of gentrification, has often struggled with a particular problem: how to account for the decidedly ambivalent character of securitization. Familiar frameworks like 'revanchism' and 'fear of crime' have proven insufficient alone to explain the seemingly paradoxical investment in insecurity that animates the security paradigm. In this article, I consider how psychoanalytic theory might be mobilized for a libidinal geography of urban (in)security, an approach that would focus less on the phantasmagoric referents against which society supposedly needs protection and more on the libidinal investments through which these referents are (re)produced and administered in order to cohere, sustain and naturalize a social and spatial order rooted in dispossession. Drawing on Lacanian articulations of fantasy, drive, jouissance and symptom and applying these concepts to a consideration of contemporary anti-gang policing in the United States, I demonstrate how ambivalence and ontological incoherence function not as evidence of security's limits but rather as liberal social order's very condition of possibility.