For the first time in history, most people live in cities. One in seven are living in slums, the most excluded parts of cities, in which the basics of urban life—including adequate housing, accessible sanitation, and reliable transportation—are largely unavailable. Why are some cities more successful than others in reducing inequalities in the built environment? In Urban Power, Benjamin Bradlow explores this question, examining the effectiveness of urban governance in two “megacities” in young democracies: Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Both cities came out of periods of authoritarian rule with similarly high inequalities and similar policy priorities to lower them. And yet Sao Paulo has been far more successful than Johannesburg in improving access to basic urban goods.
Bradlow examines the relationships between local government bureaucracies and urban social movements that have shaped these outcomes.
What We Are Reading Today: Urban Power by Benjamin H. Bradlow
https://arab.news/gjqb7
What We Are Reading Today: Urban Power by Benjamin H. Bradlow
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Rituals of War’
- Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural
Author: Zainab Bahrani
“Rituals of War” is an investigation into the earliest historical records of violence and biopolitics. In Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq (ca. 3000–500 BC) rituals of war and images of violence constituted part of the magical technologies of warfare that formed the underlying irrational processes of war. In the book, three lines of inquiry are converged into one historical domain of violence, namely, war, the body, and representation.
Building on Foucault’s argument in “Discipline and Punish” that the art of punishing must rest on a whole technology of representation, Zainab Bahrani investigates the ancient Mesopotamian record to reveal how that culture relied on the portrayal of violence and control as part of the mechanics of warfare. Moreover she takes up the more recent arguments of Giorgio Agamben on sovereign power and biopolitic to focus on the relationship of power, the body and violence in Assyro-Babylonian texts and monuments of war.
Bahrani brings together and analyzes facets of war and sovereign power that fall under the categories of representation and display, the aesthetic, the ritualistic, and the supernatural.
