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Rethinking urban prosperity through ethical imaginaries and future projects
Long Abstract:
The city is frequently framed as a driver of prosperity, both on the individual and on the societal level ('the urban advantage' - Habitat III 2016). Yet prosperity is increasingly understood as a set of values which are contextually specific and defined not just by economic measures, but also by lived experience and aspirations. Following on from Moore's (2020) understanding of the urban as a 'response to questions of the ethical imagination' and 'as a way to cultivate the future', this panel examines the role of the imaginary of the city in people's conceptualisation of prosperity and the good life.
Submissions to this session may take the form of short papers (approx. 1,500 words) or alternative formats, including video, video with slides, slides with audio, podcast (approx. 10 minutes). They may address the following questions, among others:
- What is the link between rural-urban migration, lived experience and imaginaries of prosperous urban futures?
- How does a focus on lived experience and future urban imaginaries require us to rethink urban theory?
- How can aspirations and imaginaries of locally-grounded decent lives help us rethink existing notion of 'the urban'?
- At which spatial scale is prosperity 'generated'? How is it distributed? And where and by whom is it experienced?
- At which temporal scale do urban imaginaries operate and transform?
- How can an urban ethical imagination be harnessed for progressive political projects, even in situations of ongoing and overlapping crisis and precarity?
Methodology:
This will be a paper-based panel, although contributions can take a range of formats, including video, video with slides, slides with audio, podcast/audio only or text only. The input should be between 8 and 12 minutes (or equivalent in words, i.e. 1,200-1,800 words, excluding references). Contribution by non-academic speakers are welcome. All contributions must be uploaded 2 weeks before the conference, and we strongly encourage engagement with the contributions prior to the live panel. The 40-minute panel itself will consist of 4 speakers, each of whom will reiterate their main argument for 2 minutes, followed by a 5-minute response from discussants. We will then have around 10 minutes for exchange with the audience.
I would like to discuss the educational aspirations of the poor and working-class vis a vis their imagination of the city. The paper foregrounds the pursuit and desire for mobility and belongingness in a city that is striving for world-classness.
Paper long abstract:
In the popular imagination, the two words 'education' and 'city' have often evoked a sense of optimism and liberation. It is a hope for a better life and liberation from disadvantages and stigmatized identities. Dr. B.R Ambedkar, for instance, was optimistic that the city held the promise of emancipation for the Dalits. These two concepts are also associated frequently with progress, civilization and are oriented towards the future, a better future. It is not only material progress but about the very sense of being. This paper explores the educational aspiration of the marginalized residents in a squatter settlement of Delhi and how the city figures in their desires. Delhi has received considerable attention from scholars working on the social and spatial relations in the city. In a city that aspires to become a world-class space, how the working class and poor, often the recipients of state violence, articulate their aspirations for a better future through the pursuit of education is the focus of this paper. In doing so, the paper goes beyond the narratives of exclusion, violence against the poor and class antagonism. The paper emerges from my doctoral work, an ethnographic study in a 40-year-old, multigenerational, poor neighbourhood of Delhi.
This paper concentrates on the Sham Shui Po markets area in Kowloon, Hong Kong, to critically challenge the aesthetic normativity of urban renewal, and offer some insights into the critical role played by community practices in the construction of collective identity in public space.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the socio-spatial politics of land redevelopment in Hong Kong. It offers both an investigation of the dominant ideology of economic prosperity, through a study of its impact on the everyday lives of local residents, and an analysis of the forms of social activism and resistance to the urban planning intervention, which have determined the transformation of the physical and socio-economic structures of retailing and dwelling in colonial-global Hong Kong. The selected focus is the progressive annihilation of street markets to create space for ultra-modern, luxury high-rise buildings. Street markets offer a unique lens to investigate the political discourses of the urban and to analyse the negotiation processes between the vertical strategies of gentrification and the horizontal tactics of urban resistance. Street markets are barometers of equity and economic development, collective sociality, sustainability, living heritage, social prosperity, and community cohesion. This paper concentrates on the Sham Shui Po markets area in Kowloon, Hong Kong, to critically challenge the aesthetic normativity of urban renewal offering some insights into the critical role played by community practices in the construction of collective identity in public space. This allows us to better understand the tactics of street hawker associations in the battle 'to save the market' and shed light on the ways in which they challenge the dominant ideology of economic prosperity suggesting alternative heterotopic geographies of social prosperity.
Although barrios are recognised as significant social spatial units within historic centres, urban renewal strategies are built upon imaginaries inspired by european examples that rely on spatial and social transformations. These processes need to be addressed by rethinking global south imaginaries.
Paper long abstract:
Following new urban visions and strategies within internationally promoted urban agendas to promote compact, sustainable and just cities, local governments in Mexico have sough to implement agendas and strategies that transform historic centres from deteriorated and underused places to urban hubs where mix-uses and urban renewal can be achieved. Examples of urban renewal strategies have been largely based upon perceived experiences and outcomes in the Global North, yet have been poorly analyzed in relation to context-specific responses to local situations and challenges. This has led to unreflexive implementations of urban renewal agendas and strategies within historic centres that depart from barrio-centred social spatial structures and propose new social and spatial dynamics. This process largely relates to implemented imagined urban visions that showcase a partial understanding based on the outcomes achieved in other places but which is shaping the urban imaginary for very different places and contexts. This paper aims to analyse the urban imaginaries for the historic centres of Mexico City and Guadalajara and the distance of these imaginaries from the context and needs within it to produce a theoretical understanding and contribution to global south urban imaginaries. As thes procosses have produced challenging local situations of social and urban transformations that were not forenseen. This paper is based on the findings of the PhD Thesis 'Frameworks for Urban Conservation: Social Equality Through Housing Tenure in Mexican Historic Cities: Cases of Mexico City and Guadalajara' by the author and completed in the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL in november 2021.
Drawing on fieldwork on construction and urban development in the North East of England, I will explore value as an key conceptual device through which professionals articulated the purpose of the work they did and imagined the thriving and caring city and region they envisioned it creating.
Paper long abstract:
Among local politicians and construction industry professionals involved in urban development in the North East of England, 'value' represents an important concept to explain both what they do, and why they are doing it. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the region, I will explore how for these actors, as well as scholars, the conception of value as both multiple and singular, offers a tool through which to understand, in different ways, the complexities of capitalist processes of urban development and what is at stake in these. In the context of both huge capital investment and brutal cuts to welfare provision and government spending, conceptions of value represented an important device through which professionals could harness their moral projects to economic processes. As such value offered a conceptual means through which to imagine the good city and region, one which was both growing and thriving, and able to care for those in need.
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Hanna Baumann (University College London)
Short Abstract:
Rethinking urban prosperity through ethical imaginaries and future projects
Long Abstract:
The city is frequently framed as a driver of prosperity, both on the individual and on the societal level ('the urban advantage' - Habitat III 2016). Yet prosperity is increasingly understood as a set of values which are contextually specific and defined not just by economic measures, but also by lived experience and aspirations. Following on from Moore's (2020) understanding of the urban as a 'response to questions of the ethical imagination' and 'as a way to cultivate the future', this panel examines the role of the imaginary of the city in people's conceptualisation of prosperity and the good life.
Submissions to this session may take the form of short papers (approx. 1,500 words) or alternative formats, including video, video with slides, slides with audio, podcast (approx. 10 minutes). They may address the following questions, among others:
- What is the link between rural-urban migration, lived experience and imaginaries of prosperous urban futures?
- How does a focus on lived experience and future urban imaginaries require us to rethink urban theory?
- How can aspirations and imaginaries of locally-grounded decent lives help us rethink existing notion of 'the urban'?
- At which spatial scale is prosperity 'generated'? How is it distributed? And where and by whom is it experienced?
- At which temporal scale do urban imaginaries operate and transform?
- How can an urban ethical imagination be harnessed for progressive political projects, even in situations of ongoing and overlapping crisis and precarity?
Methodology:
This will be a paper-based panel, although contributions can take a range of formats, including video, video with slides, slides with audio, podcast/audio only or text only. The input should be between 8 and 12 minutes (or equivalent in words, i.e. 1,200-1,800 words, excluding references). Contribution by non-academic speakers are welcome. All contributions must be uploaded 2 weeks before the conference, and we strongly encourage engagement with the contributions prior to the live panel. The 40-minute panel itself will consist of 4 speakers, each of whom will reiterate their main argument for 2 minutes, followed by a 5-minute response from discussants. We will then have around 10 minutes for exchange with the audience.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -Sriti Ganguly (O.P. Jindal Global University)
Maurizio Marinelli (UCL)
Monica Lopez Franco (ITESO (University))
Sarah Winkler-Reid (Newcastle University)