CITY: Analysis of urban change, theory, action
Joined February 2015
- Tweets1.8K
- Following327
- Followers7.6K
- Likes2.2K
CITY retweeted
Aquí se ve cómo la policía de @PabloLemusN detiene arbitrariamente a Samuel, un repartidor de Rappi que estaba trabajando. No iba en la marcha. Pero Lemus necesita procesar gente para no soltar su narrativa. Quien debería ir a la cárcel es él.
CITY retweeted
Mexico City and all federal authorities must uphold the right to protest for all groups and families demonstrating during the World Cup.
Groups have been campaigning for the search and identification of their disappeared loved ones for years - work that is a legitimate form of human rights defense. This must be recognized, respected and protected. Guaranteeing the right to protest is an obligation of the Mexican State.
Events surrounding the World Cup must point to humanity, not cruelty.
#HumanityMustWin
CITY retweeted
"Spatial weapons for the working class". First short review of my forthcoming book, Take Over the City, courtesy of @DonnaHaragay @CITYanalysis
@NeilGray00 new book is a really useful text for anyone interested in both learning and doing spatial politics. Everyone should read it when it comes out in July; if you can't wait till then you'll just have to read my review: tandfonline.com/eprint/FQZKV…
CITY retweeted
One of the most brutal scenes in human history has been leaked.
An Israeli soldier filmed this clip using a drone camera while proudly boasting about the destruction of all homes in Gaza.
A moment the world must never forget.
CITY retweeted
Thiago Á. & Saif A. have been kidnapped, mistreated, arbitrarily detained, to punish them and crush the growing solidarity movement against Israel's genocide in Palestine. Do not let it happen!
Demand their freedom and freedom for all Palestinian hostages!
#FreeThiago #FreeSaif
Israeli soldiers beat and tortured flotilla organisers Saif Abukeshek and Thiago Ávila after abducting them in international waters near Greece in the early hours of Thursday morning, lawyers and diplomats have said.
After illegally intercepting 22 boats and kidnapping around 200 activists hundreds of miles from Gaza, Israel transferred the majority to Greek authorities, but refused to release Abukeshek and Ávila. Instead, it transported them back to an Israeli desert prison, where Palestinians are routinely tortured.
Brazilian activist Ávila was dragged face-down across the floor and beaten so badly he passed out twice, lawyers said, after visiting him on Saturday. His wife, Lara Souza, said an embassy official told her he had been temporarily blinded by his injuries, with his left eye still swollen shut, but he was being denied medical treatment. In a brief visit, where he was separated from the consul by a glass screen and not able to speak freely, he reported pain all over his body, especially in his hand and shoulder, and said that soldiers had threatened to throw him overboard and target his wife and two-year-old daughter.
Abukeshek, who had been sailing on an observer boat and did not intend to go to Gaza, was “in shock”, his wife Sally Issa said. He was forced to lie face-down on the floor of an Israeli warship for two days, lawyers said, blindfolded and with his hands bound behind his back.
Spain has demanded Israel release Abukeshek, who is Palestinian but holds Spanish and Swedish citizenship. On Friday, prime minister Pedro Sánchez said he had been "illegally abducted by the Netanyahu government".
On Sunday, the activists appeared before an Israeli court, where a judge extended their detention by two days.
Lawyers demanded their immediate and unconditional release, telling the court the entire process was "fundamentally flawed and illegal", and describing Israel's actions as a "retaliatory measure against humanitarian activist leaders".
The two men have now been transferred back to solitary confinement in Shikma prison, where they are being held in windowless cells.
Both are on hunger strike, with Ávila saying he will not leave without Abukeshek.
CITY retweeted
🔹NBC: We saw people living in severe poverty in Havana. Is it time to take responsibility and change the Cuban system? Why not follow China or Vietnam which have embraced one-party rule while also embracing market economies?
🇨🇺 President Díaz-Canel: We study their models closely. But they were under sanctions for about a decade. Cuba has faced more than 60 years of blockade.
That is the difference. They were able to develop once restrictions eased. Cuba has not had that opportunity. We are an island 90 miles from the United States, under constant pressure.
When China and Vietnam began their development, they started from less favorable conditions than Cuba has today. So the real question is: lift the blockade and see what Cuba can do. If we have achieved this much under pressure, what could we achieve without it?
If Cuba is truly weak, as some claim, then why has the United States spent decades trying to isolate and undermine it? Why not let it fail on its own? The answer is clear.
CITY retweeted
The world, Europe, and Spain have faced this critical moment before. In 2003, a few irresponsible leaders dragged us into an illegal war in the Middle East that brought nothing but insecurity and pain.
Our response then must be our response now:
NO to violations of international law.
NO to the illusion that we can solve the world’s problems with bombs.
NO to repeating the mistakes of the past.
NO TO WAR.
lamoncloa.gob.es/presidente/…
CITY retweeted
Philanthropy as Plunder
Bill Gates doesn’t donate to save the world, he invests to own it. By capturing seed banks, gutting global protections, and weaponising “net zero,” land becomes collateral and life becomes property. This isn’t climate action; it’s enclosure, updated for empire.
“It’s a land grab.” Watch till the end…
CITY retweeted
Really looking forward to @mona_fawaz's lecture hosted by @CITYanalysis and @LSEsociology! Catalina Ortiz will be the discussant, I'll be chairing. 6:30pm on 2 March in Alumni Theatre in LSE's Cheng Kin Ku Building lse.ac.uk/sociology/events/2…
CITY retweeted
As the genocide in Gaza grows obscured and muted, the evidence of apartheid practices keeps mounting: see the latest UN report exposing Israel’s asphyxiating regime on Palestinians in the West Bank.
I await the day the ICC issues indictments for apartheid.
ohchr.org/sites/default/file…
CITY retweeted
“It’s just that all of these Caribbean resorts look exactly the same to me. It’s just a random beach.”
“Oh I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You sit at your laptop, and you select… I don’t know, that all-inclusive resort for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what cookie-cutter consumerist hotel your parents made you go to.
But what you don’t know is that hotel isn’t just all-inclusive, it’s not Ixtapa, it’s not Zihuatanejo. It’s actually Cancún. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in the late 60s, Mexico ran a huge trade deficit with the US. They were industrializing rapidly, importing machinery and materials that had to be paid for in dollars. Then I believe it was INFRATUR, wasn’t it, that actually spent months building a computer model, feeding data to an IBM 360 to analyze Mexico’s entire coastline, evaluating climate, beach quality, accessibility, and development costs.
Then they identified Cancún as a strategic tourism development zone, deliberately modeled on postwar Mediterranean resort economies. By the mid-1990s, major U.S. and European hotel chains standardized the all-inclusive resort model there. That model was then replicated, refined, and exported across the Caribbean.
Eventually, that choice filtered down through Expedia algorithms, airline bundle deals, and trickled on down into some TikTok’s influencer video which you no doubt watched in bed doom scrolling. However, Cancún represents billions of dollars in coordinated state planning, private capital, labor arbitrage, and tourism dependency. Tens of thousands of jobs. Entire regional supply chains.
And it’s sort of comical that you think you simply picked "a random beach" when in fact you’re sipping a piña colada at a resort selected for you by the Mexican federal government’s years-long optimization process… from a bunch of random beaches.”
Cancun is not my cup of tea, but boy is it an incredible success story of engineering: the Mexican government engineered a tourist hotspot custom-built to attract American dollars, from a place that had nothing in 5 short years.
In the late 60s, Mexico ran a huge trade deficit with the US. They were industrializing rapidly, importing machinery and materials that had to be paid for in dollars. Tourism offered a solution, a way to earn foreign currency using assets Mexico already had: beaches, climate, and ancient ruins.
They actually spent months building a computer model, feeding data to an IBM 360 to analyze Mexico’s entire coastline, evaluating climate, beach quality, accessibility, and development costs. The computer selected Cancun #1, a remote sandbar that had a population of 3 people during the 1970 census. The 2nd option was Ixtapa.
Cancuns location was perfect: turquoise water, white sand, ideal weather, and proximate to all of the eastern seaboard, the largest concentration of Americans enduring brutal winters and seeking affordable beach escapes.
Hawaii was already popular for folks on the west coast but Cancun offered what Hawaii couldn’t: a winter getaway without the 12+ hour flight, and a much cheaper experience.
The Caribbean location and dry season from November to April aligned perfectly with when East Coasters most desperately wanted sun.
The government invested over $100 million in infrastructure, building an international airport, roads, utilities, and dredging lagoons. They built the hotel zone for foreigners and downtown Cancun for workers, all in 5 years
They marketed Cancun aggressively to Americans, positioning it as a safe, convenient Caribbean alternative with better prices than anywhere else. Hotels catered explicitly to American tastes with English-speaking staff, American brands (Hyatt, Hilton etc) familiar food options, and all-inclusive packages.
The genius was creating a place where Americans could feel like they’d “been to Mexico” without experiencing much of Mexico at all - you could go to a Hilton, speak English, eat burgers and hot dogs, pay in dollars, but get to say you went abroad.
At the time, “going abroad" was often seen as something for the wealthy or the adventurous. For many Americans, especially those from the interior who don’t travel internationally often (as you see on the map) a Cancun vacation counts as cultural exploration, a stamp in the passport that feels adventurous while remaining completely comfortable and affordable. You didn’t need a passport to go there until 2007, which was helpful too.
The whole thing worked brilliantly, beyond their expectations. They started the project in 1970 and welcomed the first guest in 1975. By 1980, Cancun had grown to a half million tourists and a population of 34,000 supporting tourism.
Cancun is EXACTLY what Mexico designed it to be: a dollar-extraction machine that turns American desire for easy, safe “foreign” travel into billions of dollars flowing to Mexico.
—-
This story from the New York Times in 1972 was a good read: Mexico had a young Harvard-trained head of INFRATUR spearheading the program
nytimes.com/1972/03/05/archi…
CITY retweeted
You are not describing history.
You are describing the American bedtime story about history.
Let me remind you what actually happened on our soil, not in your textbooks.
North Vietnam did not "invade" South Vietnam.
Vietnam was one nation that foreign powers divided on paper and expected us to accept the way a prisoner accepts the shape of his cell.
There is no "North Vietnamese people" and "South Vietnamese people."
There is only one Vietnamese people separated by a imaginary line drawn by outsiders.
You talk about 1954 as if the partition was destiny.
It was not.
The Geneva Accords mandated free and fair elections in 1956, so the Vietnamese could reunify peacefully.
Eisenhower’s own intelligence admitted Hồ Chí Minh would win by 80 percent.
That is why the United States blocked the elections.
That is why your puppet regime was installed.
That is why the country was carved in two to prevent democracy, not defend it.
You call our president Hồ Chí Minh a "brutal scourge."
Your CIA called him "the George Washington of Vietnam."
The only thing dangerous about him was that he wanted a Vietnam not ruled by France, Japan, or America.
But let us talk about the Gulf of Tonkin, since you think "the rest is history."
There was no second attack.
There was no assault on the Turner Joy.
There was only American radar chasing ghosts in a storm, and a White House searching for the excuse it needed to unleash a war it had already decided to fight.
McNamara admitted it.
The NSA declassified the evidence.
Your own navy officers testified the incident never happened.
Yet from that lie came three million Vietnamese dead, eight million tons of bombs, Agent Orange burned into our soil and our DNA, entire provinces turned into moonscapes.
And you still recite this story as if the United States came to rescue us from ourselves.
Let me be very clear:
America did not enter Vietnam to "help" South Vietnam.
America entered Vietnam to prevent the independence of a country that refused to kneel to Western power.
The people who fought the United States were not foreign invaders.
They were farmers defending the same land their ancestors defended for over 2,000 years against the Han, the Tang, the Song, the Mongols, the Ming, the Qing, the French, and the Japanese.
We were not fighting for communism.
We were fighting for Vietnam.
And we won.
That is the part your version always forgets.
You lost a war you cannot psychologically accept losing, so you rewrite it as a morality play where America tried to save a "good" Vietnam from a "bad" one.
There was no good Vietnam and bad Vietnam.
There was only Vietnam
And the empire that tried to break it.
The rest is not history.
The rest is denial.
The United States military entered Vietnam to help south Vietnamese from the brutal scourges of communism in north Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, who decided to invade and overtake south Vietnam. Initially, U.S. involvement was limited to military aid and advisory support following the partition of Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. The pivotal moment came in August 1964, when two U.S. destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, stationed in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported being attacked by North Vietnamese forces. And the rest is history.
CITY retweeted
⛔️ CRIMINAL.
Every Palestinian is a terrorist for the Israeli army, starting with 8 and 11 year old children. This is the genocide logic which the so-called ‘ceasefire’ has not changed one inch. States must impose an ARMS EMBARGO and sanctions on Israel, not empty 'peace plans'.
CITY retweeted
A special moment.
Thank you Baroness Burt of Solihull for addressing links we identify in our research + book btw domestic abuse (DA), debt, and homelessness + for calling on gov to ensure that DA survivors are not disqualified from social housing by debt accrued through DA
CITY retweeted
BREAKING: A new UN report finds that Israel’s assault on Gaza - with the destruction of health care, education, infrastructure, even the banking system - has erased 69 years of human development, marking the worst economic collapse ever recorded.
This is not war: it is genocide.
CITY retweeted
'We do not believe that the solution to a broken welfare system is to punish the most vulnerable'
Scrapping the 2-child limit is indeed welcomed
but as my book "Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State" reveals, this budget news can only be the start not end.
We welcome @RachelReevesMP's announcement of the lift of the two-child benefit cap.
This is a much-needed change that will help support vulnerable families and children, and reduce the risk of homelessness for households across the country.
CITY retweeted
Thanks to Antonis Vradis and Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero -- two comrades and scholars whose work I admire deeply -- for their generous reviews of "For a Liberatory Politics of Home" in @CITYanalysis @dukepress
Antonis tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
Tatiana tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
CITY retweeted
Norway should rename its investing rules ‘ethical when convenient’
“Norway’s parliament paused the government’s ethical investing rules. The move will let the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, keep its stakes in companies deemed unethical under the rules, such as Microsoft and Amazon, because of their work for Israel’s government. The fund recently sold its stake in Caterpillar over Israel’s use of its bulldozers in Gaza and the West Bank.”
CITY retweeted
From India’s Western Ghats to Kochi’s construction sites, this article traces how failed colonial plantations have become sand extraction frontiers—revealing the ecological and urban legacies of “plantation urbanism.”
By Siddharth Menon
📖 ijurr.org/article/sand-plant…
