Negotiating urban conflict: Conflicts as opportunity for urban democracy

This study argues that episodes of urban conflict can serve as a lens into the challenges that society presents to citizens and to those responsible for governance. Struggles around representation, inequality, belonging, and governance are negotiated among citizens, professionals, and policy practitioners at the street-level of urban neighborhoods. Therefore, the interactions between stakeholders in situations of conflict can function as laboratories to understand how citizenship is performed through informal and unconventional street-level practices. My study is the result of four years of ethnographic case study research in which I immersed myself into the dramas of people who inhabit, govern, or practice in the urban environment. The study reveals if, when, how, and where episodes of urban conflict can be understood as moments of opportunity for ‘negotiated democracy’.