In this article, we discuss the concept of territory from a decolonized perspective. We engage with the ongoing debate on decentralizing urban studies to outline the potential drawbacks of essentializing, generalizing or objectifying the urban. Through the socioterritorial approach utilized here we seek to address these issues by shifting attention, first, to the social production of territory, and secondly, from an analysis of state strategies to the urban scale. We understand territory as being produced when subjects struggle over the practices, meanings and tenures of urban space. An example from Mexico City is employed to illustrate how territory becomes both the site and stake of social struggle. By focusing on the subjects involved in the production of territory, and on the way different subjects produce and reproduce hegemonic spaces and counter-spaces, we emphasize three aspects in particular: first, a territory's specific material conditions; secondly, the imaginarios (social imaginaries) various actors inscribe into it; and thirdly, the communal land use form of the ejido as a unique territorial regulation. Finally, we argue for the empirical groundedness of the concept of territory with the aim of further pluralizing the field of urban studies. The socio-territorial approach we propose explicitly focuses on power relations in the production of both urban space and knowledge.
Abstract. In light of his most prominent book “Territories in Resistance”
(Zibechi, 2008), we conducted an interview with the researcher, journalist, and
activist Raúl Zibechi. A well-known Uruguayan columnist with various
Latin American newspapers, Zibechi was introduced to an English-speaking
audience when translations of two of his books were published in 2010 and
2012 (Zibechi, 2010, 2012a). Combining activism and research, he has been working with social
movements throughout Latin America since the 1980s. Socioterritorial
movements, the key concept around which much of Zibechi's work revolves, are
of particular interest for our theme issue “Contested Urban Territories:
Decolonized Perspectives”. Our interview revisits Zibechi's idea of the
emergence of new or other subjects through socioterritorial practices, and in
consequence, of socioterritorial movements as harbingers of possible urban
futures. In this context, the interview also explores links to the writings
of Carlos Walter Porto Gonçalves on “territory”, Henri Lefebvre on
“space”, and Frantz Fanon on “zones of being and non-being”. We
understand a conversation along these lines as a contribution to the ongoing
debate on a decolonialization of knowledge and knowledge production in the
field of urban studies.
Abstract. This paper serves as an introduction to the
“Contested urban territories: decolonized perspectives”
special issue. The idea for this issue emerged during our reflections on a
socioterritorial perspective, preeminent in the current Latin American
analysis of contemporary urban struggles (Schwarz and Streule, 2016). It
aims to contribute to these ongoing debates about a specific understanding of
urban territories from a postcolonial and decolonized perspective by combining
contributions from two paper sessions we organized at the 2017 meeting of
the American Association of Geographers in Boston with additional papers by
scholars who could not participate in the conference. All seven
contributions tackle the question of what a relational and dynamic
conceptualization of territory may contribute to current debates in the
urban studies field. Put more precisely, to which extent are socioterritorial
approaches of value for a further decentering and pluralizing of urban theory? What is their
significance to research on urban social movements? And, finally, how does
such a socioterritorial perspective nurture and complement an analysis of
the social production of space? The present special issue invites the reader
to get familiar with new concepts and engage in a critical reflection on the
conditions of knowledge production in urban geography and beyond.
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