The question of how space matters to the mobilisation, practices and trajectories of contentious politics has frequently been represented as a politics of scale. Others have focused on place and networks as key spatialities of contentious politics. Yet there are multiple spatialities – scale, place, networks, positionality and mobility – that are implicated in and shape contentious politics. No one of these should be privileged: in practice, participants in contentious politics frequently draw on several at once. It is thus important to consider all of them and the complex ways in which they are co‐implicated with one another, with unexpected consequences for contentious politics. This co‐implication in practice, and its impact on social movements, is illustrated with the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride in the United States.
Hundreds of municipalities and counties across the United States have proposed or implemented immigration policies at the local level, ranging from "sanctuary" policies to those designed to exclude undocumented immigrants. Data collected on these policies are presented, and statistically analyzed at the municipal level to interrogate existing hypotheses about factors driving these policy decisions. Municipalities experiencing rapid growth of their foreign-born population and with a high percentage of owner-occupied housing are more likely to introduce exclusionary policies, whereas municipalities with better educated populations are more likely to adopt inclusionary policies. The location of municipalities in the U.S. South and outside central cities is also associated with exclusionary policies. Textual analysis of policy documents for selected municipalities provides insight into why similarly located places adopt contrasting policies. Local ordinances reflect contrasting local imaginaries of race, nation, and place.
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Advocating a provincialization of critical urban theory, we seek to move beyond current polarizations and disputes over the basis of urban theory, creating space to take seriously the possibility that no single theory suffices to account for the variegated nature of urbanization and cities across the world. Such provincialization requires a serious engagement with both mainstream and critical Anglophone urban theory, challenging the seeming naturalness of knowledge claims through rigorous theoretical and empirical scrutiny from the standpoint of peripheral perspectives located outside the core. This entails recognizing the existence of a shifting ecosystem of critical urban theories, putting these into even-handed critical conversation with one another. The collective resilience of urban theory will be dependent upon ongoing engagement across such diversity. At the heart of such an ecosystem are shifts in practice, seeking a new comparative analytic that destabilizes the universalism of the dominant norm, against which all other exemplars are to be compared, with the imperative of taking the field seriously.
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