Juxtacity: an Approach to Urban Difference, Divide, Authority, and Citizenship
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Juxtacity: an Approach to Urban Difference, Divide, Authority, and Citizenship Amanda Hammar 1
& Marianne
Millstein 2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Difference is foundational to urban governance and urban life. This article—and the special issue—focuses analytically on the juxtaposition of multiple urban differences, and what happens especially in relation to urban authority and citizenship when such differences articulate with each other. This analytical work is based on a conceptual lens we call juxtacity, which is used to examine the origins, dynamics, and effects of urban divides, where urban divides are seen as active, situated domains in themselves that provide key opportunities for understanding and theorizing complex urban dynamics. The juxtacity approach emphasizes three key elements of difference and division—relationality, articulation, and productive co-constitution—and their differentiated effects. The focus is especially on but not limited to more overt, visible structures of urban domination, but consciously counters the ways in which more common sense hierarchies of power leave out a wide range of subtler forms of inequality, domination, exclusion, and violence. These latter are crucial for understanding differences and divisions in cities around the world. The juxtacity approach counters EuroAmerican-as-universal urban theory. Including cases from Africa and Asia, the special issue employs a form of openly comparative southern urbanism that contributes to the wider project of theorizing from the south/ southeast. Keywords Juxtacity . Juxtaposition . Urban difference . Urban divide . Authority .
Citizenship
* Amanda Hammar [email protected] Marianne Millstein [email protected]
1
Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
2
Oslo Metropolitan University, Institute for Urban and Regional Research (NIBR), Oslo, Norway
A. Hammar, M. Millstein
Introduction Difference always matters. Whether manifested in broadly social, material, or symbolic forms, and whether with historical or more recent origins, difference maps—and maps onto—spaces, bodies, institutions, infrastructures, rationalities, practices, and relationships. It does so in ways that significantly define the unequal conditions of possibility and impossibility of living—or for some, just surviving—in the present and the future.1 Empirically, every space and time has its own structural and social configurations of difference, and hence of power and politics. Depending on the particular historical and spatial context, patterns of difference can be concerned with questions of class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, age, political ideology, and so on, either in the singular or in combination. Such differences shape access to resources and opportunities as diverse as public services, property, justice, and livelihoods. In turn, they inform differentiated experiences of urban life, including different levels of subjection to or protection from various forms of violence, linked to, among other th
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