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- Convenors:
-
Martha Radice
(Dalhousie University )
Nathalie Boucher (Université de Montréal)
- Discussant:
-
Deborah Pellow
(Syracuse University)
- Stream:
- Worlds in motion: Worlds, Hopes and Futures/Mondes en mouvement: Mondes, espoirs et futurs
- Location:
- FSS 14005
- Start time:
- 3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This panel deals with processes of urban transformation: material or social, official or vernacular, novel or nostalgic, strategic or tactical (as Michel de Certeau would say). All modes of manufacture are welcomed: technologies, infrastructure, craft, representations, etc.
Long Abstract:
How is the city made and remade? We will gather reflections on processes of urban transformation, whether they seek to make the city anew or to reconstruct it as it used to be. We are interested in both strategies and tactics of city-making, in de Certeau's terms - calculated actions deployed from a position of power (strategies) or more informal or even furtive 'poaching' actions made from the margins (tactics). We are thinking of all kinds of modes of fabrication (technologies, infrastructure, representations, craft, festivals, do-it-yourself movements, etc.), of official discourses and vernacular ones, of social and symbolic construction as much as material production.
Questions we raise include, but are not limited to these: Emerging models of urban planning based on a return to a city of proximity emphasize densification and the reenchantment of urban space, but how do these models bear up to reality when they are developed? When municipal governments ask for public consultations or even citizen interventions, do we end up with free, creative participation or does it instead burden citizens with more responsibility, while absolving political instances from it? What grassroots initiatives escape regulation or surveillance by official codes of manufacture? What city emerges from such actions and their interactions?
We seek to underline the movement between the individual and the collective, between private and political interests, between authenticity and the avant-garde. In these ways, our panel investigates the making and the remaking of the city.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic research in a Canadian former mining town -- Cobalt, Ontario -- we discuss history museums as sites where citizens can contain and restrict grand heritage tourism development schemes and put forth an imagined urban future.
Paper long abstract:
Cobalt, Ontario (pop. c. 1100) has four history museums. The museums, created at different times and by different constituencies, reflect citizens' ongoing efforts to imagine and bring about an urban future in this former mining place. Cobalt's no longer operating silver mines remain a source of pride and site of citizenship attachment for residents. Over the last 50 years, residents and officials have engaged in multiple attempts to establish the town as a mining heritage tourism destination and/or to re-establish mining. While the museums are implicated in both aspirations, we argue that the museums work to situate the memory-work of local history within discrete spaces. The four museums respectively, tell the story of Cobalt's place in the Canadian nation through the armed forces, relate the history and practices of mining, celebrate the town's volunteer fire department, and present a popular history of the town. As such, the museums have been recruited to support the successive tourism and heritage development efforts. However, the museums sit uncomfortably within grander schemes to remake the town as tourist site. Indeed, we argue that the museums serve as tactics, in de Certeau's terms, to contain and restrict tourism oriented development. As spaces where residents record and report their histories, the museums serve as statements about what the town should and should not be in future.
Paper short abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the place-making strategies through which residents of the Bisagno Valley, a postindustrial periphery of Genoa, Italy, seek to shape a vernacular heritage and to promote new forms of dwelling to resist a top-down redevelopment agenda.
Paper long abstract:
What is the process through which residents of a postindustrial periphery labeled as a "worthless landscape" (Walley 2013: 129) and slanted for redevelopment strive to establish and legitimize local "heritage" and "beauty" to protect their neighborhood? What are their place-making strategies, and how do their spatial affects emerge and become formalized as a tool of struggle? The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategies through which residents of the Bisagno Valley, a postindustrial periphery of Genoa, Italy, seek to shape a vernacular heritage and to promote new forms of dwelling to resist a top-down "progress" agenda entailing the creation of shopping malls, big box stores, and parking lots in the valley. In delving into how the spatial affect of Bisagno Valley activists articulates with their social trajectories, concerns, and challenges, this paper also explores how the political and cultural struggle intrinsic to resisting development articulates with the normative aestheticization of cityscapes that is typical of neoliberal urbanism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the proposed redevelopment of the Gdańsk shipyard that was the cradle of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, and the ways former shipyard workers contest the legitimacy of this and other urban renewal projects advocated by the Polish state.
Paper long abstract:
Several studies in Anthropology and cognate disciplines have illustrated the ways in which urban renewal results in forms of social exclusion. Yet the issue of how interventions in the socio-spatial and economic dimensions of people's lives may be an integral part of the process of national history rewriting requires further exploration. Drawing upon research conducted in the Polish city of Gdańsk, this paper examines the redevelopment of the shipyard that was the cradle of Solidarity, the mass social movement that contributed to the downfall of the Socialist state in the 1980s. In official and popular discourses, the shipyard represents a monument to Polish freedom and a symbolic terrain where Poles articulate their relationship to the state and national history. However, despite the shipyard's significance in official discourses, most of the buildings associated with the history of the Solidarity movement are likely to be knocked down to make way for the construction of apartments and office space. In illustrating how former shipyard workers who have become the victims of the economic reforms introduced by the neoliberal state contest the legitimacy of this and other urban renewal projects, the paper highlights the contradictions with which the redevelopment of the shipyard site is rife: it pursues the argument that while 'building', as a discursive practice, is often a metaphor for positive change and participation in national history, as a material process it may create new 'landscapes of power' from which a politics that is class-based is removed.
Paper short abstract:
Highlighting the nexus of tourism and diaspora helps to unveil the transnational implications of the heritage industry. Discussing data collected in Rome and Dhaka, I look at how the Bangladeshi street-vendors of Rome affect the urban ecologies of tourism through spatial and affective practices.
Paper long abstract:
Tourism and diaspora remain separate fields of inquiry. Yet the two emerge from -and propagate- neo-liberal patterns of production and consumption. What is more, both phenomena emblematize uneven hierarchies of global mobility, highly impacting urban environments worldwide. Thinking of tourism and diaspora as complementary circumstances helps to re-consider the significance of the heritage industry, thinking beyond its national implications.
The nexus of tourism and diaspora becomes apparent in the heritage landscapes of most Western European cities. While tourists visit historical sites consuming a selected pastness, newcomers find provisional employment in the heritage industry. The case of the Bangladeshi street-vendors in Rome, Italy, is exemplar. The abundance of built heritage and the conspicuous presence of visitors make tourism a primary employment sector in Rome. One that informally absorbs many immigrants and refugees who reside in the city, often illegally. Since the 1990s Rome has been a preferred destination for Bangladeshi immigrants, who constitute the third largest immigrants’ group. Approximately 2500 Bangladeshis sell gadgets in the most iconic touristic sites. Presenting data collected with qualitative methods in Dhaka and Rome, I explore the everyday habits of these Bangladeshi street vendors, as well as their continuing social and economic ties with their country of origin.
The Bangladeshis actively construct the landscapes of Roman pastness, through their spatial habits and encounter with visitors. Diaspora dynamics then affect the urban ecologies of tourism. The Heritage industry emerges as a cultural phenomenon of which the political and economic ramifications transcend localities, and affect transnational socio-economic landscapes.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines how the reconfiguration of Baghdad’s urban space post-2003 around ethno-sectarian lines has contributed to the construction of new forms of individual/collective subjectivities, which are inextricably linked tp memory-making and re-memoring in these new spaces.
Paper long abstract:
The 'security' wall proposed by the Iraqi government in 2016, and stretching more than 300 kilometers around Baghdad is another mechanism of power that furthers the fragmentation of the territory and national polity, through the segregation of communities. This process is rooted in imperial occupations and invasions of Iraq, the most recent being the US-led invasion-occupation in 2003. Resulting from US policies in Iraq, Baghdad's urban space has been reterritorialized around ethno-sectarian lines. These processes that reconfigured old neighborhoods have been concurrently erasing and marginalizing memories of a more diverse space of interaction, where spatial arrangements had enabled diverse forms of social interaction. Since memory-place are inextricably linked, the reconstitution of space diminished national consciousness and instead fostered collective solidarities based on ethnic or sectarian identities. Thus, this paper will argue that these physical structures and check points refract an imperial imaginary and strategy for a 'new' Iraq, and parallel other processes, such as census-taking, and formal institutionalization of sectarian and ethnic identities that undermine national belonging and citizenship. These processes have repercussions on memory-making in the post-2003 Baghdadi neighborhoods. Needless to say, identities are processes, always in flux and in a state of perpetual contestation in both time and space (Hall 2006), and informed by sociohistorical and political contexts. City walls and checkpoints represent "miniature" borders (Stewart 1984). In time, these miniature borders, along with other state policies fragment territory and people, confining relationships and experiences, and in turn undermining national belonging as it creates new layers of otherness.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the socio-spatial transformations that are taking place in the hinterlands of metropolitan centers and focus on the city of Gurgaon in the southwest edge of New Delhi and examines how and why a city can be made without foundational infrastructures like sewerage.
Paper long abstract:
The paper focuses on the city of Gurgaon, a city that has been under construction for a few decades now. Hastily assembled by private developers, influential policy advisors, and builders, Gurgaon is a flexibly planned city and indexes a mode of spatial production that defies normative logics of urban planning, governance, and practice and urges us to revisit some of the dominant assumptions and narratives that have undergirded standard urban theory. Gurgaon lacks a citywide sewerage and it brazenly provides privatized services to elite and middle classes, while disavowing former rural residents and new migrant workers. By examining how and why a city can be made without foundational infrastructures, I explore the absence of sewage and make two observations. First, I argue that the dismal state of infrastructure in most parts of Gurgaon is linked to a culture of uncertainty that prevails around the responsibilities of different levels of government, different governmental bodies, and around the designation of urban, rural, and transitional areas. I suggest such pervasive uncertainty has been generative as it has created a policy vacuum, which not only allows private developers to have a free run but it has also produced "a system that is designed to fail" for some and not others. Second, I describe how this uncertainty manifests on the ground. The paper draws on ethnographic research and briefly makes some methodological observations about studying invisible infrastructures that make or break the urban landscape.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore the ways that the residents of Port Vila, Vanuatu, are using a Facebook discussion group to create a sense of collective urban belonging that transcends the challenges created by "urban village" settlement patterns.
Paper long abstract:
In "The Emergence of Urban Villages: Urbanization Trends in the Pacific Islands" (2016), the Asian Development Bank identified a settlement trend labelled the "village city": rapidly growing urban areas comprised of many village-like settlements. Here, traditional forms of socio- spatial organization remain central to everyday life. Yet the informal, village-like modes of place-making that make urban life culturally meaningful and economically tenable tend to work against both the creation of a sense of urban belonging and the formalization of urban infrastructures. This is the case in Port Vila, capital of Vanuatu (~45000), where two frequent laments I heard about urban life were that "everyone sticks to their own island so you don't know how to behave when you meet others" and that "the roads [or sewers, or sidewalks] are rubbish". The transformation of Port Vila into a well-functioning municipality that feels like a collective home to its urban citizens provides myriad challenges. Here, I explore the ways that ni-Vanuatu employ an unlikely virtual tool for urban engagement and place-making: Yumi Toktok Stret (or YTS; "Straight talk"), a public Facebook discussion group with over 41000 members. Many ni-Vanuatu have inexpensive mobiles phones with free unlimited Facebook access, and use the forum to discuss urban life with those from other urban villages in the village city. Specifically, I focus on the way that discussions pertaining to urban infrastructure and development create a sense of urban belonging with the potential to surmount the challenges posed by the composition of the "village city".
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans among the ‘new wave’ of carnival ‘krewes’ (parading social clubs), this paper asks what urban symbols, stories, and commentaries circulate in parade floats and costumes, and what claims of belonging are staked through parade routes.
Paper long abstract:
New Orleans is a city made and remade every year through its carnival rituals, which take place between the Feast of Kings and Mardi Gras. Carnival in New Orleans is reflexive and self-referential: many floats, themes and costumes offer commentaries on urban affairs; many integrate references to other parades. While some New Orleans carnival traditions and krewes (social clubs that put on parades) have attracted much scholarly attention, the newer 'alternative' walking krewes, which began to appear on the scene about 30 years ago, are less well studied. These krewes hark back to the beginning of Mardi Gras parades in their small scale and handmadeness, if not in their politics. This paper asks, what symbols and stories circulate in the new-wave krewes' parades? How do they articulate belonging to the city or other scales of place (neighborhoods, Louisiana, the nation)? Moreover, while the bigger, mainstream float krewes' parade routes have been converging, new-wave krewes walk along narrower streets in different neighbourhoods. What stories are told and what urban stakes are claimed via parade routes? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans at carnival in 2016 and 2017, this paper contributes to the longstanding concern of urban anthropologists to understand how people make their cities in the ways they imagine and re-present them, as well as the ways they inhabit them.