Robert Farnan
(Stockholm Environment Institute, University of York)
Richard Friend
(University of York)
Jonathan Ensor
(University of York Stockholm Environment Institute)
Format:
Panel
Streams:
Infrastructure
Sessions:
Wednesday 6 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Cities, Urbanisation, and the Politics of Urban Infrastructure Systems.
Panel P24c at conference DSA2022: Just sustainable futures in an urbanising and mobile world.
Advancing scholarship on urban infrastructure systems, we invite papers that critically link theory & practice in order to reimagine the relationship between cities & marginalisation, with an applied & participatory emphasis on political capabilities, sustainable futures, & infrastructure politics.
Long Abstract:
Amidst the persistent marginalisation of urbanisation in the Global South, the issue of sustainable cities has increasingly been conceived in terms of urban infrastructure systems. Resonating across the disciplines of human geography and developmental studies, the issues of access, poverty, vulnerability and violence associated with the politics of urban infrastructure systems raise key questions. These pertain to the relationship between theory, practice, and the role of knowledge in addressing social marginalisation and fostering sustainable futures. The deep connection between theory and practice is often foregrounded by activists and engaged researchers, as well as grassroots practitioners, as a means by which to challenge positivist research frameworks and build equitable collaboration. Aimed at transforming societal injustices, participatory, action-oriented research provides a useful entry point for rethinking how critical urban theorising can be put to work for and by marginalised groups and their representative organisations. An explicitly political understanding of knowledge is central to how we understand both the persistence of marginalisation in relation to urban infrastructure systems, and the possibilities for urban transformation. For many the city remains a democratic space filled with hope, where rights may be claimed, justice recognised, and futures realised. Yet as others point out, urban systems and infrastructure are not only spaces of transformation but also vehicles for social marginalisation. These critical voices – drawing attention to the inequitable access, disruption and failure of urban infrastructure systems – urge us to revisit the political efficacy of our concepts, pointing to the political capabilities our theories may or may not engender in practice. Speaking to grassroots scholarship concerning marginalisation and urban infrastructure systems, we invite papers that critically link theory and practice in order to reimagine the relationship between cities, justice and urbanisation, with an applied and participatory emphasis on political capabilities, sustainable futures, and the politics of infrastructure systems.
We plan to run two or three synchronous paper-based panel sessions, comprising approximately six to nine papers. For each 40-minute session we plan to include three papers, inviting presenters to speak for no more than 8 minutes. This will enable plenty of time for Q&A at the end of each session. We will also ask contributors to circulate their interventions three weeks ahead of time, and encourage panellists to use non text-based mediums as part of their presentations, such as audio-visual and/or web-based materials. In addition to providing these papers and/or materials in advance of the sessions, the chair, on the basis of what has been shared ahead of each panel, will circulate a discussion question. This will be designed to provoke critical conversation amongst participants, and to draw out the three key contributions that each speaker will have been required to highlight as part of their presentation.
Marib, Yemen has effectively weathered many dimensions of the country's devastating civil war: holding its own despite military sieges, natural disasters, and demonstrating community cohesion despite the fact that IDPs now vastly outnumber the host community by 80%.
Paper long abstract:
Marib, Yemen has effectively weathered many dimensions of the country's devastating civil war: holding its own despite military sieges, natural disasters, and demonstrating community cohesion despite the fact that IDPs now vastly outnumber the host community by 80%. With its new population of 3 million, many of Marib's residents have experienced multiple displacements. This paper presents personal research conducted through the course of work for UN Habitat based on quantitative urban scorecard polling (R:1536) and 32 qualitative interviews with local residents. Marib has faced many of the most pressing urban growth and migration challenges of our day and leaves numerous questions for further investigation. Marib's integration of IDPs offers a unique case study of a control group to questions for conflict recovery 'durable solutions' in Yemen because it was largely off the radar of the international humanitarian response until two years ago. Marib is the product of a hybrid customary (tribal)-state system that has self-organized between formal and informal codes and multiple national and international government interests to negotiate significant infrastructure projects for its natural oil and gas and electricity. Marib ability to maintain the social contract it has established between citizens and its governing authorities will be tested as it negotiates tenure agreements over the lands by the tribes to IDP newcomers and informal neighborhoods are upgraded and incorporated into the city's services in a way that does not sacrifice its agricultural and water resources past the point of return.
A discussion on how to close the digital inequality gap through an improved knowledge infrastructure framework, which consists of monitoring the flow of information and knowledge of the city, key city knowledge actors, and different knowledge institution in a city
Paper long abstract:
Smart cities in Thailand refer to digital technologies adoption in their societies, especially in city digital infrastructure. For example, many cities in Thailand have registered as smart cities. Therefore, smart city suppliers promote their investment in the city, such as; city-data dashboard, smart pole, air sensors, 5G, and free wifi. Like other non-digital infrastructure, key beneficiaries are contractors, foreign investors and politicians. Local people are only the technology users who pay their fees while providing their personal information as a critical asset for tech companies. They can neither be a part of investors nor access key data and information of their cities. These data could help them develop new businesses in this digital economy. As the number of smart cities increases, so is inequality, even though politicians often portray an opposite picture.
This paper discusses how to close the digital inequality gap by promoting a knowledge infrastructure framework, which consists of monitoring the flow of information and knowledge of the city, key city knowledge actors, and different knowledge institutions in a city. Without making knowledge, building a smart city will become another trap of our society's development. In this era, data is a crucial asset; it not be equally distributed to the people and be a part of city knowledge infrastructure to create smart people. But so far, a smart city concept is only a new campaign for new economic investment that brings us close to digital slavery.
To equitably address climate vulnerabilities in rapidly urbanising areas, there is a pressing need to approach the urban beyond the traditional understandings of cities and better assess the implications of new urban forms and processes of extended urbanisation on inequalities and marginalisation.
Paper long abstract:
Ongoing urbanisation in the Northeast region of Thailand is driven by the development and investment of large-scale transportation networks linking cities, economic corridors, and industrialised Special Economic Zones to the neighbouring countries and China. While transport infrastructure and industrial development is guided by the national policy with an aim to lift the country out of the middle-income trap, there are no long-term strategies for urban development and land use change. The production of urban spaces is co-shaped through land by capital accumulation, speculative investment and processes of socio-environmental transformation that differentiate spatial-structural patterns within and between cities. Cities are sites of uncertainty, contestation and conflicting rationalities contributing to uneven development, informality and inequality. But the emergence of extended urban transformations, the diminishing rural-urban divide and the impact of urbanisation require new ways of understanding emerging urban conditions and political-administrative fragmentation in order to address socio-ecological interactions in cities in the context of climate change. The notion that cities are sites of both resilience and solutions to global environmental problems needs new practical approaches to understand the process and patterns of urbanisation that shape vulnerabilities, susceptibility to risks and coping capacities of local communities. In response to contemporary urban realities, this paper explores how urban environments are shaped, politicised and contested and assesses how urbanisation contributes to increasing climate vulnerabilities of different community groups within cities and across the upper Northeast region, using the concepts of urban political ecology, knowledge infrastructures and political capability.
In responding to issues around the politics of knowledge, the paper aims to address the overarching question on whose knowledge counts by deploying the analytical framework influenced by knowledge infrastructure concept to investigate artefacts produced by international agencies.
Paper long abstract:
In responding to the areas of knowledge inequality and the politics of knowledge, the paper aims to address the overarching question on whose knowledge counts in development narratives, by applying the analytical framework influenced by the concept of knowledge infrastructure to investigate knowledges. Our previous study, at a local level, found contestations around land use influenced by orchestrated efforts to increase country competitiveness via modern technology and innovation. In this study, it broadens our focus to investigate knowledge artefacts of the related concepts at the global level such as reports and studies related to competitiveness, innovation, and country income that are produced by international agencies and their networks (e.g., World Intellectual Property Organization; World Economic Forum; World Bank, and UN Secretariat). Key analytical questions centre around which knowledges/disciplines are valued and incorporated, by whom, through what techniques, and importantly whether there are rooms for local expertise and indigenous knowledges in the production of knowledge around these normative concepts in development. Their discussions will be complemented with the lens of a post-development school.
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Richard Friend (University of York)
Jonathan Ensor (University of York Stockholm Environment Institute)
Short Abstract:
Advancing scholarship on urban infrastructure systems, we invite papers that critically link theory & practice in order to reimagine the relationship between cities & marginalisation, with an applied & participatory emphasis on political capabilities, sustainable futures, & infrastructure politics.
Long Abstract:
Amidst the persistent marginalisation of urbanisation in the Global South, the issue of sustainable cities has increasingly been conceived in terms of urban infrastructure systems. Resonating across the disciplines of human geography and developmental studies, the issues of access, poverty, vulnerability and violence associated with the politics of urban infrastructure systems raise key questions. These pertain to the relationship between theory, practice, and the role of knowledge in addressing social marginalisation and fostering sustainable futures. The deep connection between theory and practice is often foregrounded by activists and engaged researchers, as well as grassroots practitioners, as a means by which to challenge positivist research frameworks and build equitable collaboration. Aimed at transforming societal injustices, participatory, action-oriented research provides a useful entry point for rethinking how critical urban theorising can be put to work for and by marginalised groups and their representative organisations. An explicitly political understanding of knowledge is central to how we understand both the persistence of marginalisation in relation to urban infrastructure systems, and the possibilities for urban transformation. For many the city remains a democratic space filled with hope, where rights may be claimed, justice recognised, and futures realised. Yet as others point out, urban systems and infrastructure are not only spaces of transformation but also vehicles for social marginalisation. These critical voices – drawing attention to the inequitable access, disruption and failure of urban infrastructure systems – urge us to revisit the political efficacy of our concepts, pointing to the political capabilities our theories may or may not engender in practice. Speaking to grassroots scholarship concerning marginalisation and urban infrastructure systems, we invite papers that critically link theory and practice in order to reimagine the relationship between cities, justice and urbanisation, with an applied and participatory emphasis on political capabilities, sustainable futures, and the politics of infrastructure systems.
We plan to run two or three synchronous paper-based panel sessions, comprising approximately six to nine papers. For each 40-minute session we plan to include three papers, inviting presenters to speak for no more than 8 minutes. This will enable plenty of time for Q&A at the end of each session. We will also ask contributors to circulate their interventions three weeks ahead of time, and encourage panellists to use non text-based mediums as part of their presentations, such as audio-visual and/or web-based materials. In addition to providing these papers and/or materials in advance of the sessions, the chair, on the basis of what has been shared ahead of each panel, will circulate a discussion question. This will be designed to provoke critical conversation amongst participants, and to draw out the three key contributions that each speaker will have been required to highlight as part of their presentation.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 6 July, 2022, -