Dear Paul,
Thank you for your comments on the symposium. By "rights to the city" I have
very much in mind the usage of Henri Lefebvre, who argued that being excluded
from the institutions and decision-making apparatuses of the city constituted a
significant mode of oppression of the working classes, ethnic, racial and other
groups. Currently, there is a lively debate about group-differentiated rights
and the inability of modern--liberal and neo-liberal--democratic regimes to
recognize such rights since they are based on the idea of individual rights.
Iris Marion Young, Charles Taylor, Chantal Mouffe, Will Kymlicka, Nancy Fraser,
Seyla Benhabib and others have begun to tackle this issue in different ways. I
suspect one of the most challenging aspects of living in our age will
increasingly become how we define and recognize group-differentiated rights.
Many political and social theorists seem to agree with that statement. Where
they don't agree is how (and whether) to recognize such rights in law and
practice. Hence the symposium I organized is trying to make a modest
contribution to this debate by focusing on rights that revolve around the city
and its institutions. If you read the symposium blurb carefully, you will
notice that it does not advocate or negate such rights but poses questions
about their appropriateness, desirability and political implications--all
legitimate questions for an academic symposium.
As for your "right to cancel all conferences of elite urban theorists," it
might be more appropriate to call that power, which--fortunately for this and
other symposia--you don't possess.
Regards,
Engin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
E n g i n F. I s i n
Assistant Professor
Division of Social Science
York University
Toronto, Canada M3J 1P3
TEL: 416.736.2100.20346 FAX: 416.736.5924
http://www.yorku.ca/faculty/academic/isin
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