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- Convenors:
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Marloes Janson
(SOAS, University of London)
Sanjay Srivastava (SOAS University of London)
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- Discussant:
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Filippo Osella
(University of Sussex)
Short Abstract:
Revisiting portrayals of cities in the Global South as stereotypes of urban dysfunction, this panel explores the question what a 'good city' is through investigating the roles played by non-governmental organisations in providing urban infrastructures and envisioning alternative urban futures.
Long Abstract:
The burgeoning anthropological interest in city life can be broadly characterised by two divergent modes of analysis and interpretation. The first approach relates to an 'eschatological evocation of urban apocalypse' (Gandy 2005: 38), portraying cities in the Global South as the stereotype of urban dysfunction. The second, by contrast, is far more upbeat, focusing on the novelties and ingenuity of the megacity. This panel takes up the challenge of reconciling these two approaches by focusing on urbanites' lived realities, their ideas of the 'good city' and practical ways of thinking about liveability and hope under stressful conditions.
We invite contributions that explore the question of 'what is a good city' through investigating the roles played by non-governmental and non-state organisational activities in providing urban infrastructures. In the absence, disruption or collapse of state-led activity, numerous grassroots organisations, residents' groups, immigrant associations, and religious movements play a significant role in establishing vernacular forms of governance, government and governmentality in cities of the Global South. Social and religious infrastructures of these kinds supplement and, at times, replace those of the state, providing succour and sustenance under precarious conditions of postcolonial urbanism. By addressing issues of urban liveability, everyday practice, and social justice in urban conglomerations around the world, this panel seeks to provide insight into how non-governmental organisations envision, anticipate, and forge alternative cityscapes and urban futures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 11 April, 2023, -Henrike Donner (Goldsmiths)
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork in Kolkata this paper interrogates how poor women's infrastructural labour in struggles over housing creates urban life in the face of state disinvestment and a politics of dispossession.
Paper long abstract:
This paper brings together different aspects of housing as social, economic and infrastructural need with informal struggles over access to shelter, home-making practices and the way they enable care work amongst poor women in Kolkata. Situated at the intersection of state provision, party politics and private provision of services, struggles over the connected home, rights in dwellings, and the making of liveable city lives for families, the paper asks what kinds of infrastructural labour is invested in making homes and how this labour is distributed across time and space in the city.
Following on from feminist critiques of scholarship on infrastructures the paper argues that poor women's labour to create homes is not only made invisible in common discussions about housing, but that their contribution to social and material infrastructures of the city enables urban life and highlights the exclusions implicit in the making and reordering of urban space under current neoliberal planning and economic regimes.
Homemaking is here not understood as a private practice but as the maintenance of social infrastructures that are intimately related to what Berlant has referred to as infrastructure as 'life-making', albeit under conditions of acute scarcity. The paper suggests that rather than bridging the gap between the metropolis in the global South either as model of resilience or dystopian disfunction, a focus on gendered infrastructural labour suggests that whilst everyday survival is based on socialities of resilience, anthropologists are increasingly faced with the need to theorise urban decline.
Murtala Ibrahim (Utrecht University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how some vigilante groups, such as Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) and Vigilante Group of Nigeria (VGN) in the megalopolis of Lagos, step in to fill a significant security and governance vacuums left by the state in the local communities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how some vigilante groups, such as Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) and Vigilante Group of Nigeria (VGN) in the megalopolis of Lagos, step in to fill a significant security and governance vacuums left by the state in the local communities. As the second largest city in the African continent, Lagos has been bedeviled with multiple urban problems and contradictions that range from extreme inequality to poverty, sprawling informal settlements, and weak investment in internal security by the government, which have created a fertile breeding ground for crime and criminal gangs. The social ecology of crime expands at the most desperate urban margins, leading to drug abuse, petty theft, extortion, and serious crimes, such as armed robbery and kidnapping. In this environment, the work of vigilantes goes beyond security provision to an array of services for local communities. Vigilantes settle disputes between neighbors; resolve issues related to domestic violence, public sanitation, public road repair, and drainage; and discipline delinquent children. Vigilantes also tackle witchcraft and the occult, which they claim police have no expertise in handling. The configurations of security work, infrastructural provisions, and civic governance consolidate vigilantes’ authority and reinforce their legitimacy. This paper argues that based on their security and civic governance, vigilante groups act as autonomous movement that performs “statecraft from below,” in which sovereign decisions become limited and localized.
Melissa Demian (University of St Andrews)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the donor-driven narrative of “fragility” in Papua New Guinea in light of work on community organisations in the PNG city of Lae that serve local understandings of what stability and security might look like.
Paper long abstract:
In 2019 the United States passed the Global Fragility Act, creating a priority area for development initiatives focused on stabilising the economies and political landscapes of “fragile” states, particularly those in which China has evidenced an interest. Among the countries included in this initiative is Papua New Guinea (PNG), which has not been a strategic priority for the US since World War II. As PNG is catapulted back over the horizon of American attention, the “fragility” of the country’s institutions and major population centres has become an area of focus for the US alongside other donor countries.
My research in the city of Lae suggests some of the ways in which people living in Lae’s informal settlements create their own stability out of precarious living conditions. Settlement communities have organised “take back the streets” events to confront rising crime rates, held reconciliation meetings to de-escalate conflicts, and created self-help groups for women seeking redress for domestic violence. These initiatives occur at the nodes of contact between state or church organisations, and community groups so small that they fly below the radar of either national or international agencies. I will explore how these points of connection support the durability of life in Lae’s settlements, and ask how the “fragility” narrative contains the potential not only to make these connections more visible to the donorscape, but also to obscure the ongoing work of settlement communities to govern themselves.
Julia Perczel (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores an unlikely ecological cooperation between a scrap dealing caste and middle class urbanites working to provide e-waste recycling infrastructures in Delhi. I ask questions about environmental justice and dispossession between the lower caste Maliks and corporate India?
Paper long abstract:
Rather than a place of anonymity and equal opportunities for all, postcolonial Delhi has become iconic as the site in India where stark social and economic inequalities are most tangible. These inequalities have often been portrayed as contributing to urban disfunction, and exacerbating unequal effects of poverty and various environmental stressors. In contrast, this paper proposes to examine an unlikely alliance between the city’s upper middle classes working in corporate offices and the city’s Muslim scrap dealers operating out of informal markets. The Maliks, Muslim Telis from West UP, operate an all-India community-based e-waste and scrap collection network that converges in New Delhi. Sahih Kaam, a for-profit Producer Responsibility Organisation, takes advantage of the community’s aggregating work to buy up e-waste in bulk to help corporations comply with India’s E-waste (Management) Rules of 2016. Delhi’s waste management system and scrap trade is communally organised, with particular types of waste being taken care of by different groups. When developmental aspirations and environmentally responsible business schemes of the middle classes are conceived of, lower caste groups such as the Maliks and their “Bottom of the Pyramid” communicative infrastructures need to be acquired to make money while doing good (Elyachar 2012; Cross 2019). This paper explores this cooperation and what it reveals about urbanites' changing horizon of hope and aspirations and the emerging role of cities as aggregators of people and things in providing solutions to ecological challenges. I ask where environmental justice and where dispossession lie between the Maliks and corporate India?
Rebekah Plueckhahn (University of Melbourne)
Paper short abstract:
Attention to the shifting ‘quality’ of building infrastructure produces a materialist ethics of the urban among residents in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. This allows residents to subtly challenge urban power relations while negotiating the daily minutiae of infrastructural breakdown and possibility.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how residents of middle-income apartment housing negotiate access to unequally applied residential building infrastructure in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It examines residential perspectives of urban infrastructural connectivity and the roles of apartment owner’s associations within this. Fast rates of urban growth since 2010 have resulted in large amounts of middle-income residential housing being built. However, ageing socialist-era heating infrastructure plus a greater demand on water and other infrastructures has resulted in newly built housing having uneven forms of infrastructural connectivity in this extremely cold capital city.
In doing so, this paper presents a subtle perspectival shift away from the anthropology of urban infrastructures themselves, towards the anthropology of residential urban aesthetic detection and perceptions of infrastructural quality. It examines how residents pay close attention to the material nature of surrounding urban environments to try and anticipate and stop future breakage or rupture. This, I argue, produces a materialist ethics of the urban, where attention to urban aesthetic detail produces critiques of the types of relations of power shaping the city. However, while this materialist ethics presents a way in which residents aim to shape a ‘good city’ from below, it is also in flux – producing moral ambiguities that shapes resident’s relations with each other. I will discuss this through examining the role apartment owner’s associations which form groups of residents who bridge the divide between residents of buildings and the market of infrastructural provision and the municipal governance of urban infrastructure.
Enkelejda Sula-Raxhimi (Saint Paul University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the urban challenges of the Haitian capital city Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the urban governance – its logics, discourses, actors and materiality – to respond to such challenges.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the urban challenges the Haitian capital city Port-au-Prince has faced in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the urban policies – its logics, discourses and materiality – to respond to such challenges.
Following the 2010 earthquake, about 1.5 million internally displaced Haitians were located in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, adding pressure to a fragile housing and urban infrastructure. Such massive displacements gave rise to many camps and other makeshift dwellings and provoked an extended sprawling of the informal settlements, which further exacerbated the inequalities and social divide in the city. In some cases, it led to pushing the poorest displaced Haitians out of the urban areas, by blurring and extending the boundaries of the city into informal urban spaces. Concurrently, such massive displacements forced the government and other actors to rethink certain urban policies and regulations in order to accept, formalize and extend these new urban spaces. Through the case of Port-au-Prince and Caanan township urbanization processes, I examine the political materiality of such processes by addressing the following questions: How natural and climate disasters in Haiti reactivate matters – policy processes, ideas, urban designs, resilience and solidarity – and bring new, albeit imperfect, urbanisation solutions to city’s growing challenges? How does the transformation of the urban space in Port-au-Prince reflect the social tensions and inequalities exacerbated by the disaster, violence and climate stresses?
Benedikt Pontzen (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
Traditional religious presences are an integral feature of Africa’s multireligious cityscapes. Investigating Accra’s Akonnedi Shrine, I trace the multiple ways in which African religious traditions become part of people’s urban lifeworlds and enable them to cope with life in this metropolis.
Paper long abstract:
Traditional religious presences are an integral part of people’s lives in many African cities and a substantial feature of Africa’s multireligious cityscapes. Investigating the Akonnedi Shrine in Accra, I trace the multiple ways in which African religious traditions are present in people’s lives in the Accra metropolis; and I consider how this shrine is, in turn, affected by its urban surroundings. Since its foundation in the late nineteenth century, Akonnedi has become one of Accra’s most prominent shrines as it has adapted itself to the needs and expectations of its urban clientele. Its paramount deity, the female spirit Akonnedi, and the other deities of this shrine are renowned to attend to the needs and worries of socially marginalized people, especially women, who seek the shrine’s help in times of distress. Furthermore, as Accra’s citizens widely consider Akonnedi as guarantor of social justice they come to settle their disputes and conflicts at her shrine. Invoking Akonnedi by name enables people to make moral claims on one another in their daily lives or to curse wrongdoers. As a site of social support and justice, the Akonnedi Shrine promotes a ‘traditional’ vision of the good city. However, ‘traditional’, Muslim, and Christian actors compete with one another for religious hegemony in Accra’s multireligious cityscape. Consequently, Akonnedi and other traditional religious presences have become ardently contested matters in this city. In my paper, I discuss the multiple ways in which Akonnedi is an integral and contested part of Accra’s city life and its urban dynamics.
Marloes Janson (SOAS, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
Redressing the one-dimensional generalization of the ‘apocalyptic megacity’, this paper discusses how religious entrepreneurs have become actively involved in urban restructuring plans to convert Nigeria’s former capital Lagos from a ‘Sin City’ into a ‘Prayer City’.
Paper long abstract:
The New Republic (1993) magazine described Lagos – Nigeria’s economic hub and the third largest city in the world – as ‘impoverished, filthy, steamy, overcrowded and corrupt’, and ‘the ultimate incarnation of the modern megalopolis gone to hell’ (July 12: 11; cited in Hackett 2011: 129n.14). That Lagos is widely associated with immorality is also apparent in the stories about child kidnappings, abductions from taxis and buses, ritual killings, and trade in body parts that are widespread. Redressing the one-dimensional generalization of the ‘apocalyptic megacity’ (Koolhaas 2001), this paper discusses how religious organizations have become actively involved in urban restructuring plans to convert Lagos from a ‘Sin City’ into a ‘Prayer City’ (Ukah 2013; 2016).
Contributing to Lagos’s urban renewal, many religious entrepreneurs have invested in prayer camps – spectacular sites where hundreds of thousands of worshippers flock to attend prayer services – that have cropped up along the Lagos–Ibadan Expressway, which connects Nigeria’s first and third largest cities. Having morphed into permanent prayer, living, working, and production sites, these prayer camps are being projected as model cities for Christians and Muslims. My paper illustrates that the prayer camps along the Expressway act as road builders in rendering meaningful the unstable flux of life in Lagos. An increasing number of the urban upper middle classes have moved permanently in these prayer camps, which replaced the municipal services of the state and provide their residents with a sense of hope to overcome the contingencies of everyday living in the megacity.