Urban Rage: the revolt of the excluded,

摘要

A comparative analysis of contemporary urban revolts, Urban Rage is Mustafa Dikec's recent attempt to enlarge the geographical scope of his research on urban politics. In Badlands of the Republic (Blackwell, 2007), he situated the urban riots in France (2005) in the context of three decades of French urban policy. In his later work, Space, Politics and Aesthetics (University of Edinburgh Press, 2015), Dikec ventured into the philosophies of Ranciere, Arendt, and Nancy to make a case about the spatiality and esthetics of politics. His latest work, Urban Rage is an empirical showcase of his theoretical articulation of the urban disruptions as inherently political collective endeavors. With Urban Rage, Dikec provides a rich inventory of urban revolts in many different cities ranging from Ferguson, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, and Baltimore (chapter 2) to London (chapter 3), Paris (chapter 4), Stockholm (chapter 5), Athens (chapter 6), and Istanbul (chapter 7). Each case we read about is a collective response of our times to discrimination, powerlessness, inequality, and denied justice that the urban dispossessed have increasingly felt. Time and again, these feelings have been sharpened to such an extreme extent that they became tangible in the form of devastating rage. It is this pungent feeling - the urban rage - radiating from the inner cities, banlieues, gecekondus, slums, or fbrorts, of Europe and the USA that Dikec puts at the center of his book. Dikec. defines urban rage - a term evoking emotion and, perhaps, impulsive reaction - as "rage against systematic, sustained oppression with many resources" (11). In his analysis, rage acquires two layers; it is spatial and political. First, these riots arise in urban spaces as they have become the mainstay of capital accumulation in the last four decades through urban renewal and gentrification. The accumulation strategies generate particular spatialities for those whose lives were affected adversely by dispossessing market processes and urban governmental policies. In his words, "the participants in the uprisings [...] are the ones who bear the burden of urban change and development without benefitting from its advantages" (215). Dikec shows patterns of spatial isolation and marginalization of minority groups in diverse contexts such as inner-city communities in the USA, communes in the banlieues of France, poor fororts of Malmo and Stockholm in Sweden, and Istanbul's gecekondu communities.