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This session discusses public participation and community-based approaches to planning, water, and mental health with papers from different geographies and disciplines.
Long Abstract:
Multiplicity, the balancing of epistemic infrastructures and collective action outside of capitalist and urban regimes have emerged as a possible way to navigate contemporary challenges and conflict in a way that doesn't leave the majority of the Global Community out of the equation. This panel looks at grassroots initiatives from different continents and disciplinary perspectives, to find ways of re-conceptualising the urban condition through "rooted", or bottom-up epistemologies.
Panelists will look at the grey spaces between established binaries, new colonialities and their fragmented infrastructures/governmentalities, anthropogenic crises, trauma-inflicted pasts and their neurological impact on the future, and provide hopeful glimpses at community solutions.
Methodology: Panelists will upload pre-recorded presentations. Convenors will ask panelists to watch other people's presentation in advance of the synchronous sessions. The convenors will also share in advance what they think are the key questions emerging from the recorded presentations which will be prompts for the synchronous discussion. The convenors will also start the synchronous session outlining these questions. Then, each presenter will give a 2min pitch summarising their key argument and another 2min in which they address one of the key questions form the convenors. After this, the discussion will be open to the audience with convenors' moderation.
Understanding current processes (in this case the 'invited' and 'invented' spaces of participation both terms borrowed from Cornwall, 2002; Miraftab, 2004) which shape material realities of urban conditions in the global South can contribute to wider planning research and practice debates.
Paper long abstract:
Increasingly it is becoming clear that we are living in a global moment, in which the imagined future of most places in the world in both the global South and North is one of conflict. While we are collectively facing compounded and human-made crises of racial violence, climate change, pandemics, wars and new colonialities, this exposes the need to look carefully and critically beyond the capitalist regime to deep systematic transformations that recognise multiplicities and alternative futures, methods of knowing and ways of living and practising. This paper explores tropes of thoughts from local grassroots initiatives in Amman that envisage possibilities of living differently outside the world's modern dimension. Through exploring different spaces of 'invited' and 'invented' participation, this paper investigates the various ways in which grassroots and CBOs navigate and manipulate the state apparatus' rules and grids of organisation to create alternative modes of meaningful participation. Building on de Certeau's notion of tactics, I argue for looking at the everyday practices within the 'invented' spaces as 'tactics' used by the grassroots to subvert the order of things, a way that people use to engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics in Jordan to negotiate power within the authorities. Time in the field allowed me to critically look at the 'invented' spaces of participation as a salient sphere in which state power, political agency and creative tactics intersect, I contend looking at these practices outside a binary lens of legality/informality, state/society or 'invited'/'invented', where they are neither insurgents nor passive.
During this panel contribution, I will discuss varieties of community-based solutions to lacking water & health infrastructures, and potential policy implications. Vimeo Link with Presentation, as well as PDF of Powerpoint Slides.
Paper long abstract:
Urban health inequalities are both the origin and symptom of unjust cities. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed socio-spatial health gradients across urban areas, showing the impact of social, historical and political factors on individual, public and ecological health.
The importance of the water-health nexus is widely recognized, less so the de-politisized ways of framing access to water and historically oblivious portrayal of health infrastructures. Policy recommendations therefore continue to fall short of long-term urban transformation. In this panel contribution, I will look at the reasons for fragmented water infrastructures in Lagos, their sponsorship mechanisms and implications for public health in Makoko, a settlement built on water but without access to public water or health infrastructures. Considering community-driven health solutions that tackle waterborne diseases will provide the basis for adequate policy intervention, and looking at ways to scale up such interventions is the goal of this contribution.
Adverse childhood/community experiences result in many Kenyan adolescents/youth wrestling with trauma-inflicted pasts. Proactive community-lead healing approaches help reconcile these wounds, but also potentially improve their envisioning of better futures for themselves and future generations.
Paper long abstract:
Youth and adolescents in Kenya and across much of Africa experience chronic stress and trauma due to high levels of poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, police harassment, violent crime, and terrorism (i.e., youth being recruited by the Somalia-based al-Shabaab terrorist group). Evidence shows that the utilisation of community-led trauma healing interventions oriented around holistic mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) approaches within these marginalised groups result in improved agency, social cohesion, and resilience among youth. This research project explores how these MHPSS projects can systematically address poverty, justice, and mental health by potentially increasing individuals' futures consciousness and subsequent proactive decision-making regarding their future. Neurobiological studies using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging reveal that reflecting on the past and thinking about the future are processed in the same regions of the brain. Therefore, unresolved, constraint-laden, traumatising, unhealed pasts can lead to limited abilities to envision a better future. If the past can be reconciled and healed, the neurobiological foundation for engaging with more informed and effective futures thinking could be restored. This study addresses this gap, but also provides empirical evidence to support the Triple Dividend—a World Health Organization (WHO) concept that holds with increased investments now with adolescents (10-19-year-olds) on issues related to their health and wellbeing can yield a "triple dividend" of benefits that will transform 1) the capabilities of the current adolescent population; 2) their future trajectories of health/wellbeing into adulthood; and 3) their ability to increase the welfare of their own children, i.e. the next generation.
Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
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Short Abstract:
This session discusses public participation and community-based approaches to planning, water, and mental health with papers from different geographies and disciplines.
Long Abstract:
Multiplicity, the balancing of epistemic infrastructures and collective action outside of capitalist and urban regimes have emerged as a possible way to navigate contemporary challenges and conflict in a way that doesn't leave the majority of the Global Community out of the equation. This panel looks at grassroots initiatives from different continents and disciplinary perspectives, to find ways of re-conceptualising the urban condition through "rooted", or bottom-up epistemologies.
Panelists will look at the grey spaces between established binaries, new colonialities and their fragmented infrastructures/governmentalities, anthropogenic crises, trauma-inflicted pasts and their neurological impact on the future, and provide hopeful glimpses at community solutions.
Methodology: Panelists will upload pre-recorded presentations. Convenors will ask panelists to watch other people's presentation in advance of the synchronous sessions. The convenors will also share in advance what they think are the key questions emerging from the recorded presentations which will be prompts for the synchronous discussion. The convenors will also start the synchronous session outlining these questions. Then, each presenter will give a 2min pitch summarising their key argument and another 2min in which they address one of the key questions form the convenors. After this, the discussion will be open to the audience with convenors' moderation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -Jakleen Al-Dalal'a (The University of Sheffield)
Nura Ali (UCL)
Steven Lichty (Stellenbosch University)