Bloggers' Right to the City
Subtitle: Navigating Cairo's Real and Virtual Spaces of Freedom
Publisher: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Saarbrucken, Germany
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9783846528471
Description: Faced with formidable challenges to expression in Cairo's public spaces, urban blogger activists have developed new means of articulating dissent with spatial tactics from boycott campaigns, cyber-activism and protest art to innovations in mobilisation, modes of communication and organisational flexibility. Urban blogger activists have transformed Spaces of Freedom into heterotopian zones for public protest, employing urban installations and street graffiti, prompting the construction of a significant site of urban resistance and spatial contestation. This was particularly evident during January 2011 pro-democracy street rallies and sit-ins within Cairo's Tahrir Square, this part of the city being regarded as a contested site for collective action and as a symbolic space for urban youth's political participation and spatial appropriation. The emergence of this grassroots street activism opens up a new public sphere through which the role of urban governance might be contested to accommodate cultural identities within various forms of spatiality and popular democracy.
Table of contents: title: List of Figures; title: List of Tables and Boxes; title: Preface; title: Chapter One:  Blogosphere in the Space of Flows; title: Chapter Two: Networked Social Movements and Geographies of Protest; title: Transnational Networks and Flâneur Activists; title: Chapter Three: The Bloggers' Movement and the Egyptian Blogosphere; title: The Egyptian Blogosphere and Online Activism; title: Bloggers' Narratives; title: Chapter Four: Bloggers Reclaiming the Streets; title: The Right to the City; title: Cairo's Contested Public Spaces; title: The Flâneur Activists and Bloggers' Street Movement; title: Chapter Five: The New Civil Society Mobilisation; title: 2011 Winter Uprising in the Space of Global Flows; title: Emerging Hybrid Spaces of Freedom; title: Bibliography; title: Endnotes