Urban Insurgencies

This chapter is set against the backdrop of infrastructural injustice, this time on a larger scale of a partitioned city which artificially segregates and weakens civil society. The chapter speaks about the “reclaiming” of not only the signature plazas, but also the ordinary streets, intersections, and abandoned buildings in the City Center by the activists during the October 2019 protests as a way of overcoming the legacy of exclusionary urban infrastructure. The author argues that by establishing makeshift encampments in the middle of roads–infrastructural barriers, also separating the Central City from sectarian enclaves—the protesters symbolically and practically reconnected the city fabric and reclaimed their right to decision-making from the neoliberal planning bodies formally in charge.