Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second biggest city is both seen as a leisurely paradise and a dangerous drug-warzone at the same time, two contra-dictory spatial images. In Rio de Janeiro, the urban conflict between the rich, formal city and the favela and the police and the favela has produced an abstract spatial image of the favela and its residents as being violent. In the same way in which the formal city and police have produced their abstract spatial image and social space of the fa-vela, those in the favela has produced their own abstract spatial imag-es of the police, the formal city and of themselves. This development in Rio de Janeiro is juxtaposed with the similar development in Los Angeles during their drug war in the 1980’s.This study analyzes, through narratives, how the spatial images in both Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles have been constructed and shaped their urban landscapes into a fortified and exclusionary one.

The mobility of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem is usually understood in terms of exclusion, reflecting their lack of access to urban services more broadly as well as the restrictive mobility regime at work across the Palestinian territories. Yet after fifty years of Israeli occupation, a more complex and contradictory situation has emerged in the city. This dissertation uses mobility as a vehicle to arrive at a more integrated understanding of the paradoxical manner in which Palestinian Jerusalemites are simultaneously excluded from and incorporated into the city and to analyse how they negotiate their interstitial and often contradictory position. The thesis approaches the question of Palestinian quotidian movement by engaging with theoretical work on mobility and embodied movement as well as from empirical study including eight months of on-site research. In its three core sections, the work examines in detail several manifestations of the restriction, facilitation, and contested nature of mobility. In the first section, a discussion of Palestinian exclaves and enclaves of the city shows the continuities of mobility’s exclusionary effects on both sides of the Separation Wall. This limitation of movement leads to a restriction of spatio-political possibilities – but at the same time, Palestinians expand the horizon of what is possible through everyday and leisure practices. The second section employs two case studies of recent public transport developments in East Jerusalem to examine how incorporation is operationalised through everyday movements across urban space. The third section analyses the paradoxical role of mobility as the result of a tension between the settler colonial and the neoliberal logics concurrently at work in the city. On the one hand, the restriction of movement gradually renders the Palestinians as external to their city. On the other, the facilitation and regulation of mobility in East Jerusalem also serves to normalise Israeli rule and constitute Palestinians as incorporated urban residents, thereby undermining long-term aspirations for autonomy in the east of the city. The examination of the manner in which mobilities are contested in Jerusalem shows that movement, although often associated with freedom and independence, is essential for negotiating the terms of interdependence in the city.