Paper short abstract:

This paper examines insecurity and vulnerability as experienced by the people of central Bhutan. I argue historical wealth inheritance systems as the primary reason why precarity, particularly among older adults, persists at their home spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Precarity has attracted renewed interest across the academic spectrum. It has become a byword for the lives of many people within the labour market of neoliberal capitalism of the post-industrialized Global North. Because of the ubiquity of displacement, social exclusion and precarity in the capitalist world on the one hand, and the prevailing notion of pre-industrialised worlds as secure arenas on the other, precarity is often understood as a phenomenon of urban, market-based societies.

In this paper, I examine precarity within the home in a non-industrialised milieu. I take home spaces as the site of my analysis where social security, integration and sustainability are usually found but where vulnerability, precarity, and disconnectedness may also occur. On the basis of participant observation and interviews, I demonstrate that older adults in central Bhutan, who are characterised by immobility due to frailty and disability, experience spatial injustice and alienation not only from the larger community but also within their home spaces. The paper argues that while old age, stigmatised sicknesses, and limited health services contribute to precarious status, the main cause of precarity in later life is attributable to the historical wealth inheritance system. I present a critical analysis of the land inheritance and descent system, considering its linkages to the transformation of one's home from a secure and inclusive to an insecure and disorienting place.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork working with migrant workers in a toy factory in Shantou city, China for fourteen months, this paper explores the rural migrants' floating mind-set of homeawayness in urban China and its social implications for future policymaking while designing urban SDGs.

Paper long abstract:

To leave home in order to make a home, the movement of labour migration itself may become one's quest for home. In China, most rural-urban migrants return home only once a year, usually during the Chinese New Year. How does one experience home when being-at-home becomes one's 'annual holiday' while being away-from-home comes to stand for everyday life? Based on ethnographic fieldwork studying internal migration in China (living and working with migrant workers in a toy factory in Shantou city for fourteen months), this paper explores the migrants' floating mind-set of 'homeawayness'—that is, one has a rooted home somewhere else, whether concrete or imagined, while having one's everyday life uprooted from that home, one possesses or are possessed by an alternative sense of being-in-the-world, a liminal sense of being not at home but also not homeless. In particular, this paper scrutinises moments of being among the migrants' daily lives in the toy factory, arguing that these seemly trivial moments capture something significant of their home-making practices, both behavioural and ideational—aching with love, with missing home, with tiredness, with frustration for a wage, with anger or with existential crisis, the migrants' longing for home, for love, for success was expressed explicitly momentarily. The paper ends with a discussion on the social implications of homeawayness, especially how future policymaking should also take into account rural situations while designing urban SDGs: making future cities stay-able as well as making rural areas return-able for migrants.

Paper short abstract:

People of colour spend less time in nature in the UK than white people. My paper presents ethnographic research exploring poc's relationships with nature; the role nature plays in their lives and the reasons why nature may or may not feature strongly in family cultures and daily experiences.

Paper long abstract:

In countries of heritage people of colour are often closely connected to

nature, but a disconnect occurs in the west. There is wide recognition

in environmental fields and culturally amongst black and Asian

communities, that we are less present in nature in the UK than white

people. As a consequence people of colour miss out on the pleasures,

health benefits and are less involved in conserving green spaces.

People of colour or more likely to live in urban areas with a

deficiency of access to nature and are disproportionately effected by environmental

conditions which harm health.

My paper presents ethnographic research exploring people of colour's

relationships with nature in the UK,drawing from my work as a Nature

Allied Psychotherapist and in leading a nature connection programme in

London; exploring the role nature plays in the lives of people of colour

and the reasons why it may or may not feature strongly in family cultures and

daily experiences.

I will present an ethnography of the overt and covert contestation of

access and belonging in natural spaces in the UK; and the experience of

racism, trauma and loss in being disenfranchised from habitats which are

nurturing and supportive. I will explore the dynamics with other humans

which have interfered in people of colour's relationships with nature and

highlight black led work being done with people of colour to rebuild

bridges into relationship with the natural world, offering healing and

establishing time in nature as integral to health and resilience for

city life.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social and poltical processes in which the making/unmaking of children's socio-natures shape urban equity and children's spaces, as a set of socio-material relations that enable practices associated with personal, social and environmental benefits.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines recent municipal interventions to create urban green amenities directed toward children and families, and brings a novel understanding of the ways in which the making/unmaking of children's socio-natures through such interventions shape urban equity and children's wellbeing. We ask: How does the political and social production of green-playful-child-friendly amenities shape children's wellbeing? This work draws on ethnographic and archival analysis of two new parks - Poble Nou and Nou Barris - in Barcelona. We find that planning processes and visions; urban development goals; and neighbourhood socio-material structure moderate the effect of green-playful-child-friendly amenities on wellbeing by directing how these spaces are used. This finding points toward the importance of accounting for processes that generate what we call "relational wellbeing", as a feature of the socio-material relations that arise within a space and that enable practices associated with personal, social and environmental benefits. These processes are often reflective of broader economic agendas of urban transformation designed to extract value, control space, and/or legitimize speculative urban development - while sometimes eroding local socio-material conditions - to the point of producing green spaces of privilege, exclusion and control. The connection between relational wellbeing and green-playful-child-friendly interventions highlights the importance, within the urban environmental equity literature, of reconceptualizing pathways of wellbeing and health beyond questions of green space's socio-spatial distribution.

Paper short abstract:

This article focuses on a new municipally-promoted cooperative housing model in Barcelona; particularly in its potential to challenge the hegemony of homeownership. This model will be considered a means to politicising everyday life by cultivating ways of living and (re)producing space in common.

Paper long abstract:

This article focuses on a new municipally-promoted cooperative housing model in Barcelona which has been devised as an alternative to homeownership. This model has been conceived as a response to a new housing crisis generated by processes such as the gentrification and the touristification of the city. The initiative is based on making municipal land available to cooperatives which are granted user rights over it to develop their autonomous housing projects. The article explores the potential of this model to break free from the neoliberal, state-backed promotion of homeownership which has been conducive to the hypercommodification and financialisation of housing. It also points to the importance of transcending the hegemony of discourses on homeownership, which have been deployed on the working class to suppress class unrest and break institutionalised systems of solidarity. In other words, under neoliberalism, discourses on homeownership have been ideologically used to turn the subjectivties and interests of the working-class into those of individualised, indebted investors vulnerable to market fluctuations, and the welfare state into an asset-based welfare. However, in these housing initiatives, the use-value of homes comes to the fore, in contrast to financialised dynamics which produce houses as tradable assets. Consequently, this model will be considered a means to politicising everyday life by cultivating ways of living and (re)producing space in common from which collective subjectivities could emerge. In addition, these initiatives aim at challenging exploitative dynamics, which not only take place around houses but also within them, by collectivising and degendering housework and care.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims at exploring the nexus between housing policy, home and vulnerability through the case study of the PER (Programa Especial de Realojamento, or Special Housing Programme).

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims at exploring the nexus between housing policy, home and vulnerability through the case study of the PER.

The PER was launched in 1993 to eradicate slums in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto - which the its legislation defined as "a scourge still open in our social fabric". The PER therefore aimed at rehousing almost 50,000 households, while at the same time boosting a stagnating construction sector.

The urgency of the problem was widely recognised at the time; however, several problematic aspects of the PER were highlighted before its implementation (with academics noting that "people are not things you put into drawers", Guerra 1994), as well as in studies published later (highlighting the residents' "satisfaction with the house/dissatisfaction with the neighbourhood", see e.g. Guerra 1999). Indeed, many tension points emerged over time: the definition of slums through sanitary language; the problematic use of census data; the top-down mechanisms of implementation; and the consciousness over the negative externalities associated to large scale rehousing policies (Tulumello et al. 2018).

This paper ethnographically illustrates how the PER's design and implementation were reflected in the residents' experience, showing how the programme succeeded in providing new homes, but often failed in addressing the condition of vulnerability associated with living in informal neighbourhoods. To illustrate the residents' experience, this paper presents material from an ongoing ethnographical research in Alta de Lisboa and Cascais, in the context of the project exPERts (www.expertsproject.org).

Paper short abstract:

A visual ethnography research work dealing with the experience of home and memory within a group of people which have been displaced following to the breakdown of the Morandi bridge, in Genova (Italy), on 14.08.2018.

Paper long abstract:

What did displaced people really lose, in addition to the house, following the collapse of the Morandi bridge, on 14th August 2018, in Genoa? Memories, ornaments and objects that are meaningful or representative of a family history, but above all the meaning of a relationship with the past, with a physical place and with a community.

What then happens are the attempts to make sense of this experience, the efforts to negotiate with the institutions, the anger that never disappears, and the daily practices that no longer adapt to new spaces and new rhythms of life. All this constitutes a process of reconstruction of social subjectivity.

Thus, to those who were previously mere neighbors or persons who knew each other only superficially, to those who were labeled with a word that seems to refer only to the material dimensions of home, the so called "sfollati" (displaced persons), appear a new sense of belonging; and in this context, memory, both individual and collective, becomes a tool of political struggle.