Faranak Miraftab
Biographic Data
| ID | 322981 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Faranak Miraftab |
| GIVEN NAMES | Faranak |
| FAMILY NAME | Miraftab |
| SIGNATURE | MIRAFTAB F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 731 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 29 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Urbanizing social reproduction
Feminist social reproduction scholarship has shown how reproductive labor is critical in understanding the evolving dynamics of global capitalism. However, more work is needed to explicate the spatial dimension of this relationship to understand the various modalities through which social reproduction is enrolled in capitalist city-making processes and how these modalities are contested. Drawing on observations from multiple sites ranging from ci…
Everyday urbanisms in the pandemic city
Drawing on GenUrb’s comparative research undertaken in mid-2020 with communities in five cities—Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Georgetown, Guyana, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China—we engage in an intersectional analysis of the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in women’s everyday lives. Our research employs a variety of context-specific methods, including virtual methods, phone interviews, and socially-distanced interviews to enga…
The Joy of Many Stories
In this article, we reflect on our experiences of teaching urban planning courses that through storytelling center on issues of globalization, urbanization, planning, and social and spatial inequalities. We contemplate using zine-making and multimedia story-mapping to overcome impediments instructors usually face in engaging diverse students in appreciating the complexities of social justice on global and local scales. In light of critical femini…
Insurgencia, planificación y la perspectiva de un urbanismo humano
Publicación científica semestral de acceso abierto. El objetivo principal es difundir el conocimiento especializado sobre temas regionales y urbanos y, de esta manera, enfrentar y abordar los problemas del desarrollo territorial. Mediante la difusión de análisis críticos y de propuestas alternativas, busca redefinir los territorios, bajo los cambios estructurales económicos, sociales, culturales, políticos y ambientales que viven Latinoamérica y …
“We are All Refugees”
This paper is in conversation with two important bodies of literature: one on informal settlements (informal and insurgent grassroots practices) and another on camps (spatial practices and governance of refugees). Reading inhabitants’ experiences in Korail, an informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, through the literature grounded in the experiences of refugees, we seek to contribute to the relational theorization of informal settlements and ca…
Insurgency and Juxtacity in the Age of Urban Divides
Global Heartland
Faranak Miraftab. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. xvi and 310 pp., illustrations, tables. $30.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-253-01934-9); $80.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-253-01927-1).Faranak Miraftab
Insurgência, planejamento e a perspectiva de um urbanismo humano
Conferência de Abertura do IV World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC), realizada no Rio de Janeiro, em 3 de julho de 2016. Tradução de Ester Limonad, docente do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geografia da Universidade Federal Fluminense (POSGEO/UFF)
Elaine Rosa Salo
Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World
Small cities, big issues: Indian cities in the debates on urban poverty and inequality
Emergent Transnational Spaces
This article asks whether locality and the varied resources, networks and racialized histories of local actors make a difference in the experience of immigrants and their transnational practices. Such questions are typically explored in metropolitan centers and global cities, but the present work results from an ethnographic study of a previously all-white rural Illinois town, where the meat processing industry recruited a labor force translocall…
Faraway Intimate Development
This multisited global ethnography concerns the intimate and unequal relationships that connect revitalization of a Midwestern packing town to development processes in immigrant workers’ communities of origin in Togo and Mexico. It brings to light how immigrants’ families, friends, and home institutions subsidize reproduction of people and place in immigrants’ communities of destination—complex processes and practices I call global restructuring …
Symposium Introduction—Immigration and Transnationalities of Planning
Urban Politics
Urban politics is a multidisciplinary field, in other words a number of bits — so to speak — of different disciplines work on it. While those in political science might claim to produce the bulk of the work in this field, others in anthropology, economics, human geography, planning, social policy and sociology can also claim to be making a contribution. The introduction situates the six sections comprising this essay, in which contributors discus…
Insurgent Planning
This article revisits the notion of radical planning from the standpoint of the global South. Emerging struggles for citizenship in the global South, seasoned by the complexities of state-citizen relations within colonial and post-colonial regimes, offer an historicized view indispensable to counter-hegemonic planning practices. The article articulates the notion of insurgent planning as radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal speci…
Sundown Town to 'Little Mexico
For more than a century, communities across the United States legally employed strategies to create and maintain racial divides. One particularly widespread and effective practice was that of 'sundown towns,' which signaled to African Americans and others that they were not welcome within the city limits after dark. Though nearly 1,000 small towns, larger communities, and suburbs across the country may have engaged in these practices, until recen…
Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality
To achieve a world-class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio-spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post-apar…
Feminist praxis, citizenship and informal politics
This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning those. The article also she…
For the City Yet to Come
Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship
This article concerns the struggle waged by the poor in Cape Town, South Africa, to assert their constitutional rights to shelter and basic services and protect their life spaces against neoliberal policies. Using insurgent urbanism and active citizenship as its conceptual guide, this article attempts to enhance understanding of grass-roots spaces for practicing inclusive citizenship, stretching beyond a limited interpretation of formal citizen p…
Making neo-liberal governance
This article casts light on the ideological apparatus of neo-liberal governance. It tries to analyze how neo-liberalism operates as an authorizing narrative that links ideas such as empowerment, social capital and community participation to rationalize the nature, means, and ends of its governing. Formulation of the community-based waste collection strategies by the municipal government in Cape Town, South Africa, during the period 1997–2001 is t…
Can You Belly Dance? Methodological questions in the era of transnational feminist research
Power imbalances between the researcher and the researched, in particular with respect to Western (‐trained) scholars researching among women in the Third World, have been the focus of feminist debate on field research methodology for over two decades. This research note present paper, drawing on an example of field research carried out among female heads of households in Mexico, stresses the significance of this debate in the context of the glob…
Public-Private Partnerships
This article concerns the equity dimension of partnerships between disadvantaged communities and local governments and private sector firms to provide basic services and amenities. It examines the necessary conditions for fulfilling the expectation that such partnerships can serve the interests of the poor and the critical role of state in intervention to level the playing field for such a partnership. In the context of decentralizing third world…
Neoliberalism and casualization of public sector services
This article focuses on the waste collection strategies of the municipal government in Cape Town, South Africa, using the case as a point of entry to a wider critique of global neoliberalism and the privatization of municipal services. The analysis of the case sheds light on the links between the cost recovery agenda of the neoliberal state and the casualization of labor. To minimize costs, local governments, like private sector firms, rely on an…
The Perils of Participatory Discourse
This article concerns the discursive use of community participation in processes of human settlement development. It focuses on South African housing policy, which expected to implement a people-centered policy through developer-driven strategies. Stressing two important conditions with respect to the conception and institutionalization of participatory processes, the paper examines the policy's failure in its participatory agenda, whereby contra…
Insurgent Planning
This article revisits the notion of radical planning from the standpoint of the global South. Emerging struggles for citizenship in the global South, seasoned by the complexities of state-citizen relations within colonial and post-colonial regimes, offer an historicized view indispensable to counter-hegemonic planning practices. The article articulates the notion of insurgent planning as radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal speci…
Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship
This article concerns the struggle waged by the poor in Cape Town, South Africa, to assert their constitutional rights to shelter and basic services and protect their life spaces against neoliberal policies. Using insurgent urbanism and active citizenship as its conceptual guide, this article attempts to enhance understanding of grass-roots spaces for practicing inclusive citizenship, stretching beyond a limited interpretation of formal citizen p…
Public-Private Partnerships
This article concerns the equity dimension of partnerships between disadvantaged communities and local governments and private sector firms to provide basic services and amenities. It examines the necessary conditions for fulfilling the expectation that such partnerships can serve the interests of the poor and the critical role of state in intervention to level the playing field for such a partnership. In the context of decentralizing third world…
Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality
To achieve a world-class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio-spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post-apar…
Neoliberalism and casualization of public sector services
This article focuses on the waste collection strategies of the municipal government in Cape Town, South Africa, using the case as a point of entry to a wider critique of global neoliberalism and the privatization of municipal services. The analysis of the case sheds light on the links between the cost recovery agenda of the neoliberal state and the casualization of labor. To minimize costs, local governments, like private sector firms, rely on an…
Sundown Town to 'Little Mexico
For more than a century, communities across the United States legally employed strategies to create and maintain racial divides. One particularly widespread and effective practice was that of 'sundown towns,' which signaled to African Americans and others that they were not welcome within the city limits after dark. Though nearly 1,000 small towns, larger communities, and suburbs across the country may have engaged in these practices, until recen…
Feminist praxis, citizenship and informal politics
This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning those. The article also she…
The Perils of Participatory Discourse
This article concerns the discursive use of community participation in processes of human settlement development. It focuses on South African housing policy, which expected to implement a people-centered policy through developer-driven strategies. Stressing two important conditions with respect to the conception and institutionalization of participatory processes, the paper examines the policy's failure in its participatory agenda, whereby contra…
Can You Belly Dance? Methodological questions in the era of transnational feminist research
Power imbalances between the researcher and the researched, in particular with respect to Western (‐trained) scholars researching among women in the Third World, have been the focus of feminist debate on field research methodology for over two decades. This research note present paper, drawing on an example of field research carried out among female heads of households in Mexico, stresses the significance of this debate in the context of the glob…
Everyday urbanisms in the pandemic city
Drawing on GenUrb’s comparative research undertaken in mid-2020 with communities in five cities—Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Georgetown, Guyana, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China—we engage in an intersectional analysis of the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in women’s everyday lives. Our research employs a variety of context-specific methods, including virtual methods, phone interviews, and socially-distanced interviews to enga…
Urban Politics
Urban politics is a multidisciplinary field, in other words a number of bits — so to speak — of different disciplines work on it. While those in political science might claim to produce the bulk of the work in this field, others in anthropology, economics, human geography, planning, social policy and sociology can also claim to be making a contribution. The introduction situates the six sections comprising this essay, in which contributors discus…
Flirting with the enemy
Revisiting Informal-Sector Home Ownership
This article examines the linkages between the housing options of the poor and their household composition. It gathers field data among renters and owners in low-income neighborhoods of Guadalajara, Mexico, and it argues that informal-sector home ownership is not favorable to the conditions of female householders. Thus, housing assistance programs that focus solely on conditions of housing in informal settlements and that promote home ownership i…
Faraway Intimate Development
This multisited global ethnography concerns the intimate and unequal relationships that connect revitalization of a Midwestern packing town to development processes in immigrant workers’ communities of origin in Togo and Mexico. It brings to light how immigrants’ families, friends, and home institutions subsidize reproduction of people and place in immigrants’ communities of destination—complex processes and practices I call global restructuring …
Risks and Opportunities in Gender Gaps to Access Shelter
Urbanizing social reproduction
Feminist social reproduction scholarship has shown how reproductive labor is critical in understanding the evolving dynamics of global capitalism. However, more work is needed to explicate the spatial dimension of this relationship to understand the various modalities through which social reproduction is enrolled in capitalist city-making processes and how these modalities are contested. Drawing on observations from multiple sites ranging from ci…
Complexities of the Margin
In this paper I attempt to address complexities that exist in sheltering efforts and housing decisions of household heads among marginal population groups. I try to unfold layers of difference and reveal nuances that exist in housing concerns of low-income household heads, based on gender and age. I deconstruct the categorical grouping of 'the urban poor' as a homogenous population and female-headed households as 'the poorest of the poor'. I show…
Emergent Transnational Spaces
This article asks whether locality and the varied resources, networks and racialized histories of local actors make a difference in the experience of immigrants and their transnational practices. Such questions are typically explored in metropolitan centers and global cities, but the present work results from an ethnographic study of a previously all-white rural Illinois town, where the meat processing industry recruited a labor force translocall…
Symposium Introduction—Immigration and Transnationalities of Planning
(Re)Production at Home
This article concerns homes and families that are organized around home-based production, referring to the cases of Guadalajara and Zapotlanejo in Mexico. It addresses a reconceptualization of home and family as units of production and reproduction. Both the exploitative and the liberating aspects of home-based work are discussed, particularly those for married women who are tied to their homes because of child-rearing responsibilities and who ma…
(Re)Production at Home
This article concerns homes and families that are organized around home-based production, referring to the cases of Guadalajara and Zapotlanejo in Mexico. It addresses a reconceptualization of home and family as units of production and reproduction. Both the exploitative and the liberating aspects of home-based work are discussed, particularly those for married women who are tied to their homes because of child-rearing responsibilities and who ma…
Flirting with the enemy
Revisiting Informal-Sector Home Ownership
This article examines the linkages between the housing options of the poor and their household composition. It gathers field data among renters and owners in low-income neighborhoods of Guadalajara, Mexico, and it argues that informal-sector home ownership is not favorable to the conditions of female householders. Thus, housing assistance programs that focus solely on conditions of housing in informal settlements and that promote home ownership i…
Complexities of the Margin
In this paper I attempt to address complexities that exist in sheltering efforts and housing decisions of household heads among marginal population groups. I try to unfold layers of difference and reveal nuances that exist in housing concerns of low-income household heads, based on gender and age. I deconstruct the categorical grouping of 'the urban poor' as a homogenous population and female-headed households as 'the poorest of the poor'. I show…
Risks and Opportunities in Gender Gaps to Access Shelter
The Perils of Participatory Discourse
This article concerns the discursive use of community participation in processes of human settlement development. It focuses on South African housing policy, which expected to implement a people-centered policy through developer-driven strategies. Stressing two important conditions with respect to the conception and institutionalization of participatory processes, the paper examines the policy's failure in its participatory agenda, whereby contra…
Making neo-liberal governance
This article casts light on the ideological apparatus of neo-liberal governance. It tries to analyze how neo-liberalism operates as an authorizing narrative that links ideas such as empowerment, social capital and community participation to rationalize the nature, means, and ends of its governing. Formulation of the community-based waste collection strategies by the municipal government in Cape Town, South Africa, during the period 1997–2001 is t…
Can You Belly Dance? Methodological questions in the era of transnational feminist research
Power imbalances between the researcher and the researched, in particular with respect to Western (‐trained) scholars researching among women in the Third World, have been the focus of feminist debate on field research methodology for over two decades. This research note present paper, drawing on an example of field research carried out among female heads of households in Mexico, stresses the significance of this debate in the context of the glob…
Public-Private Partnerships
This article concerns the equity dimension of partnerships between disadvantaged communities and local governments and private sector firms to provide basic services and amenities. It examines the necessary conditions for fulfilling the expectation that such partnerships can serve the interests of the poor and the critical role of state in intervention to level the playing field for such a partnership. In the context of decentralizing third world…
Neoliberalism and casualization of public sector services
This article focuses on the waste collection strategies of the municipal government in Cape Town, South Africa, using the case as a point of entry to a wider critique of global neoliberalism and the privatization of municipal services. The analysis of the case sheds light on the links between the cost recovery agenda of the neoliberal state and the casualization of labor. To minimize costs, local governments, like private sector firms, rely on an…
Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship
This article concerns the struggle waged by the poor in Cape Town, South Africa, to assert their constitutional rights to shelter and basic services and protect their life spaces against neoliberal policies. Using insurgent urbanism and active citizenship as its conceptual guide, this article attempts to enhance understanding of grass-roots spaces for practicing inclusive citizenship, stretching beyond a limited interpretation of formal citizen p…
Feminist praxis, citizenship and informal politics
This article focuses on the Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) in Cape Town, South Africa, which is part of the larger anti-privatization movement, mobilized by disadvantaged township residents to assert their constitutional rights and resist evictions and service disconnections. It introduces the mutually constituted concepts of invited and invented spaces of citizenship and stresses the range of grassroots actions spanning those. The article also she…
For the City Yet to Come
Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality
To achieve a world-class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio-spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post-apar…
Insurgent Planning
This article revisits the notion of radical planning from the standpoint of the global South. Emerging struggles for citizenship in the global South, seasoned by the complexities of state-citizen relations within colonial and post-colonial regimes, offer an historicized view indispensable to counter-hegemonic planning practices. The article articulates the notion of insurgent planning as radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal speci…
Sundown Town to 'Little Mexico
For more than a century, communities across the United States legally employed strategies to create and maintain racial divides. One particularly widespread and effective practice was that of 'sundown towns,' which signaled to African Americans and others that they were not welcome within the city limits after dark. Though nearly 1,000 small towns, larger communities, and suburbs across the country may have engaged in these practices, until recen…
Faraway Intimate Development
This multisited global ethnography concerns the intimate and unequal relationships that connect revitalization of a Midwestern packing town to development processes in immigrant workers’ communities of origin in Togo and Mexico. It brings to light how immigrants’ families, friends, and home institutions subsidize reproduction of people and place in immigrants’ communities of destination—complex processes and practices I call global restructuring …
Symposium Introduction—Immigration and Transnationalities of Planning
Urban Politics
Urban politics is a multidisciplinary field, in other words a number of bits — so to speak — of different disciplines work on it. While those in political science might claim to produce the bulk of the work in this field, others in anthropology, economics, human geography, planning, social policy and sociology can also claim to be making a contribution. The introduction situates the six sections comprising this essay, in which contributors discus…
Emergent Transnational Spaces
This article asks whether locality and the varied resources, networks and racialized histories of local actors make a difference in the experience of immigrants and their transnational practices. Such questions are typically explored in metropolitan centers and global cities, but the present work results from an ethnographic study of a previously all-white rural Illinois town, where the meat processing industry recruited a labor force translocall…
Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World
Small cities, big issues: Indian cities in the debates on urban poverty and inequality
Global Heartland
Faranak Miraftab. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. xvi and 310 pp., illustrations, tables. $30.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-253-01934-9); $80.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-253-01927-1).Faranak Miraftab
Insurgência, planejamento e a perspectiva de um urbanismo humano
Conferência de Abertura do IV World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC), realizada no Rio de Janeiro, em 3 de julho de 2016. Tradução de Ester Limonad, docente do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geografia da Universidade Federal Fluminense (POSGEO/UFF)
Elaine Rosa Salo
“We are All Refugees”
This paper is in conversation with two important bodies of literature: one on informal settlements (informal and insurgent grassroots practices) and another on camps (spatial practices and governance of refugees). Reading inhabitants’ experiences in Korail, an informal settlement in Dhaka, Bangladesh, through the literature grounded in the experiences of refugees, we seek to contribute to the relational theorization of informal settlements and ca…
Political science (24 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Economic growth (11 works) · Geography (11 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (11 works) · Politics (9 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (8 works) · Law (7 works)