Philipp Horn
(University of Sheffield)
Olivia Casagrande
(University of Sheffield)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Gender & generation
Sessions:
Wednesday 6 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Alternatives to urban development: Youths between multiple crisis and future visions.
Panel P10a at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
The panel explores the implications of multiple crisis for urban youths and discusses future visions and alternatives to urban development proposed by youth collectives and movements. We invite papers from authors from distinct disciplines who work on these topics in different global settings.
Long Abstract:
Our urbanising world is characterised by multiple crisis. Climate change, informalisation, political polarisation, deepening racial divides, and growing epidemiological risks characterise our present and shape our urban future. Such a dystopian reality has particularly adverse effects for youths who represent the urban majority in the global South and increasingly in the global North-East. Urban youths, especially those living and working informally, experience deepened levels of inequality, stress linked to climate and health, socio-economic precarity, and political exclusion. Yet urban youths are not passive victims but take their lives in their own hands. Through locally situated practices, everyday routines but also engagement in urban protests and movements transcending the local scale (for example, Know Your City TV, Fridays for Future, or the International Indigenous Youth Council), they call for urban development alternatives that confront our present condition of multiple crisis. Urban development alternatives are understood here broadly as future visions and approaches concerned with issues of self-determination related to material access, use and control of cultural, economic, political, physical or social resources and the potential of collective organisation for more socially, economically and ecologically just cities.
This panel explores the implications of multiple crisis for urban youths and examines different alternatives to urban development proposed by them. We invite contributions that address one or more of the following questions: How do multiple crisis affect urban youths? What are the hopes, desires, and imaginations of urban youths and how are they articulated through everyday practices, protests and engagement in (trans)local movements? What alternatives to urban development result from such practices? How does a focus on urban youth activism and futurism help us to rethink concepts of the just and equitable city?
We invite papers on the above-mentioned topics that focus on different global urban settings and mobilize distinct disciplinary, conceptual and methodological perspectives. We invite contributors to submit academic papers but are also open to alternative submissions such as recorded talks or short films. Independent of their format, contributions (1) must offer a clear response to at least one of the questions highlighted in the above call for papers and (2) introduce a question/ argument to be discussed further in the synchronous discussion. Contributions must be uploaded and shared online in advance with participants, session chairs and conference attendees. Recognizing differences and disparities in terms of access to software/ internet connection, we accept different submissions (including papers of up to 1,000 words and video/ audio recordings of up to 10 minutes in length). The 40-minute synchronous panel discussion at the DSA conference will take the format of a Q&A, whereby the panel chairs will kick off with a series of contribution-specific questions and comments followed by discussion with the wider audience.
This paper explores SDI urban youths' vision and work for more just urban futures. It examines if, and how they depart from theories and practices of previous generations, and analyses the reasons for these differences to highlight what it means for movement-building in the urban development sphere.
Paper long abstract:
Urban youths, especially those living and working informally, experience inequality at disproportionate levels. However, there are numerous examples of their capacity for collective organization to build more just urban futures.
This paper explores the situation of urban youths in the Know Your City TV and Young People's Federation within the SDI movement, examining their vision and work for a more socially, economically and environmentally just future. It describes if and how their theories and practices depart from those of previous generations, and analyses the reasons for these differences to highlight what it means for movement-building.
To do so, we propose two sets of questions. The first one is aimed at understanding the youths' theories and practices for change: What are the hopes, desires and imaginations of urban youths involved in KYC TV and the SDI movement as regards just and sustainable urban futures? How do they articulate these in their everyday practice and engagement in (trans)local movements? The one deals with intergenerational relationships within the movement: How do youths' practices relate to those of the older generation in the SDI movement? What do youths decide to "keep"? What do they do differently? Why?
Exploring these differences we hope to contribute elements to explore a broader question: How do new generations of trans-local social movements adapt to ever-evolving challenges, to continue imagining and building just alternatives to urban development that correspond with their times? We hope discussion offers insights on intergenerational movement building for more just urban futures.
This paper discusses indigenous youth visions for just and sustainable cities. We will share scenes from a documentary film co-produced with young Aymara women from El Alto, whose visual testimonies, re-enactment and imaginations speak to debates around indigenous alternatives to development.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on Bolivia, this intervention discusses indigenous youth visions and implications for just and sustainable cities. Bolivia is renown internationally for promoting indigenous rights, post-neoliberal development and decolonisation in its 2009 constitution. Research to date, however, highlights gaps between legal rhetoric and practice, emphasising how Bolivia's government continues with extractivist development as usual and reproduces colonial imaginaries, for example by considering cities - albeit being home to a predominantly young population who self-identify as indigenous - to be non-indigenous spaces. In addition to being denied from indigenous rights and experiencing ethno-racial discrimination, urban indigenous youths currently confront a domestic crisis exacerbated by the global pandemic. They often lack socio-economic opportunities despite high levels of education. Young indigenous women are also disproportionately affected by intra-familial violence and sexual harassment.
Yet, our collaborative research, conducted over the last year in the cities of El Alto, Rurrenabaque, Sucre and Santa Cruz, highlights that urban indigenous youths have not lost hope. In this intervention, we particularly draw on a collaboration with four young Aymara women from El Alto with whom we deployed participatory video-making as a tool to articulate and enact youth problems and visions. We will share film scenes to make visible their extraordinary multi-local and multi-active lives, their efforts to combine modern urban culture with Aymara language and tradition, and their dreams for anti-racist and eco-friendly forms of urban co-habitation. In a brief follow-up talk, we will position these visual testimonies within debates around indigenous and decolonial alternatives to development.
Insights into the dilemmas and wicked problems facing young people in two sites in South Africa and Ethiopia and the limits of state intervention.
Paper long abstract:
Ethiopia and South Africa's youth experience high unemployment, and lack affordable housing. Ethiopia, recently invested in Africa's largest industrial complex in Hawassa, creating new employment for youth. In South Africa, wavering historic investment in Bronkhorstspruit, a former industrial decentralisation site, means high youth unemployment. Successful provision of state housing means some youth are housed, but cannot afford living costs. Youth faced with this wicked conundrum, respond creatively, managing these near-impossible conditions, with differing outcomes. Focusing on these two cases , this study examined the youth work/housing nexus in both cities, examining the everyday experiences of youth in both cities. Utilising an innovative research methodology that aimed at the co-production of data, the teams in both contexts revealed the difficulties and challenges that young people face, their sense of powerlessness to change existing structures and to the deep sense of belonging and entrenchment that they feel within their contexts. Respondents also describe how either due to a lack of housing options or a lack of financial options they are often stuck in their parental homes, sharing with family members and in some ways "trapped" in an unending status of being youths. The elusive pursuit and achievement of autonomy is linked to the co-dependent and mutually contingent situation of being financially and socially dependent. The study offers a deeply descriptive account of these youths' life-worlds, their hopes and aspirations and the effect and impact that state policies have on the micro-lives and every day existence of the youth in these urban contexts.
Under the restless pace of urban informality, Medellín's youth tackle insecurity by embodying 'unyielding hopefulness' in family-building, labour market interactions, and social participation. Their actions challenge the gender order, narco-trafficking's influence, and the elite's model of progress.
Paper long abstract:
Medellín's youth are caught between "waithood" and "busyness": waiting for crucial life stages that should enable social mobility - university graduation, stable employment, home ownership - while rushing to meet family and economic obligations and participate in short-lived opportunities offered by the city's insufficient investments in education and citizenship participation. The contradictory nature of these states creates profound anxieties.
Yet, youth refuse victimhood-status through 'unyielding hopefulness', expanding notions of what is possible delimited by exclusion and social inequalities. They respond to overlapping crises and envision a dignified life:
- In intimate relationships, reshaping the traditional family model, imagining the couple as a partnership rather than male authority and female subservience. Youth as parents interrogate the role of fathers and socialise their children into more egalitarian gender norms.
- In interactions with labour markets, what appears as a lack of reliability to employers is rather a form of resistance to casualisation, flexibility as a strategy against chronic unpredictability.
- In their social participation, youth generate actions founded on self-governance, mentoring, and remembering that serve as accountability mechanisms to the clientelistic culture of government-provided opportunities, gaining purpose unobtainable through precarious work. Managing limited resources, they mobilise the pool of neglected talents in Medellín's periphery, demanding a reassessment of where innovation truly lies.
Through these actions, youth challenge narco-trafficking's penetrating influence, aggressive masculine identities, and exclusionary models of development. This emphasises the pace of urban life under informality, the disruptive practices youth employ as a response, and gendered dimensions of these processes.
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Olivia Casagrande (University of Sheffield)
Short Abstract:
The panel explores the implications of multiple crisis for urban youths and discusses future visions and alternatives to urban development proposed by youth collectives and movements. We invite papers from authors from distinct disciplines who work on these topics in different global settings.
Long Abstract:
Our urbanising world is characterised by multiple crisis. Climate change, informalisation, political polarisation, deepening racial divides, and growing epidemiological risks characterise our present and shape our urban future. Such a dystopian reality has particularly adverse effects for youths who represent the urban majority in the global South and increasingly in the global North-East. Urban youths, especially those living and working informally, experience deepened levels of inequality, stress linked to climate and health, socio-economic precarity, and political exclusion. Yet urban youths are not passive victims but take their lives in their own hands. Through locally situated practices, everyday routines but also engagement in urban protests and movements transcending the local scale (for example, Know Your City TV, Fridays for Future, or the International Indigenous Youth Council), they call for urban development alternatives that confront our present condition of multiple crisis. Urban development alternatives are understood here broadly as future visions and approaches concerned with issues of self-determination related to material access, use and control of cultural, economic, political, physical or social resources and the potential of collective organisation for more socially, economically and ecologically just cities.
This panel explores the implications of multiple crisis for urban youths and examines different alternatives to urban development proposed by them. We invite contributions that address one or more of the following questions: How do multiple crisis affect urban youths? What are the hopes, desires, and imaginations of urban youths and how are they articulated through everyday practices, protests and engagement in (trans)local movements? What alternatives to urban development result from such practices? How does a focus on urban youth activism and futurism help us to rethink concepts of the just and equitable city?
We invite papers on the above-mentioned topics that focus on different global urban settings and mobilize distinct disciplinary, conceptual and methodological perspectives. We invite contributors to submit academic papers but are also open to alternative submissions such as recorded talks or short films. Independent of their format, contributions (1) must offer a clear response to at least one of the questions highlighted in the above call for papers and (2) introduce a question/ argument to be discussed further in the synchronous discussion. Contributions must be uploaded and shared online in advance with participants, session chairs and conference attendees. Recognizing differences and disparities in terms of access to software/ internet connection, we accept different submissions (including papers of up to 1,000 words and video/ audio recordings of up to 10 minutes in length). The 40-minute synchronous panel discussion at the DSA conference will take the format of a Q&A, whereby the panel chairs will kick off with a series of contribution-specific questions and comments followed by discussion with the wider audience.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -