Funambulist #16 Proletarian fortresses (march/april 2018)

Proletarian Fortresses is an issue that proposes a resolutely political reading of self-built neighborhoods, appropriated architectures, refugee camps, and worker quarters. Constructed against the humanitarian and romanticizing orientalist narratives, it insists that these urban forms exist in the tension of what they are prevented to be by various embodiment of state violence and what they succeed in being thanks to their residents’ daily resistance. Commissioned contributions take us in São Paulo’s favelas (Jaime A. Alves), Morocco’s self-constructed douars (Soraya El Kahlaoui) and colonial worker quarters (L’Uzine), Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza (Ahmed al Shanti) and the West Bank (Ahmad Alaqra), Hong Kong’s late Kowloon Walled City (Sharon Lam), Lisbon’s Cape Verdian, Angolan, and Gypsy’s bairros (Ana Naomi de Sousa & António Brito Guterres), and Paris’ Roma slums (Henry Shah), while student projects are situated in Amman (Majed Abdulsamad, Jun Seong Ahn, Maria Isabel Carrasco, & Haochen Yang), Aleppo (Aleksander Nowak), and Athens (Ida Helen Skogstad). Lastly, the guest columns bring us news “from the fronts” in the Basque Country (Ula Iruretagoiena & Ibon Salaberria), Dhaka (Parsa Sajid) and Puerto Rico (Marisol LeBrón & Javier Arbona).