ABSTRACT
The last three decades have seen a global spread of democracy as many countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia have undergone transitions from authoritarian rule to electoral and liberal democracy. Recent years have also produced a general shift from centralization to decentralization in discourses, institutional arrangements and practices of governance. Whereas decentralization is reconfiguring the spatiality of state institutions and politicalpractices, democratization is redefining the relationship between state and society. At the same time, economic globalization and the global spread of neoliberalism have pushed public administration from statist towards market, community and network forms of governance (Scholte 2005). Taken together, these processes have transformed the possibilities and dynamics of popular political inclusion. On the one hand, the public affairs that come under democratic control have been reduced and depoliticized as decision-making and implementation have shifted away from democratically elected governments. On the other hand, democratization and decentralization have created new and transformed local political spaces for different actors with highly diverse interests, capacities and strategies. This is not the least the case in the urban south, where institutional reforms towards democratization, decentralization and neo-liberalization create both opportunities and obstacles for popular participation and representation at the scales of cities, wards and neighbourhoods. Cities are also spaces of diversity and vibrancy in society, both in terms of identities and associations, yielding complex and contextual forms of popular politics (Kitharo et al. 2010; Rossi and Vanolo 2012). Cities in the global south can thus be thought of as laboratories of democratic governance and transformative democratic politics.
