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- Convenors:
-
Martin Lamotte
(CNRS/EHESS)
Maria Anita Palumbo (LAA/LAVUE+ENSASE)
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- Discussants:
-
Ferdinando Fava
(University of Padova/LAA-LAVUE UMR 7218 CNRS)
Michel Agier (EHESS-IRD)
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- V406
- Sessions:
- Thursday 12 July, -, -, Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
What are the connections between uncertainty and contemporary cities? Is there still space for uncertainty within the city? Acknowledging the tendency to domesticate "uncertain" spaces in the city, we would like to cross fieldworks on spaces that embody uncertainty in order to question them.
Long Abstract:
In the context of a neo-liberal society where a number of conceptions chaired in the industrial city are no longer relevant, cities are in tension between a continuous transformation and the will to regulate and control this movement by a security and urbanism agenda. Uncertainty is part of the result and is expressed in different ways that this session would like to highlight. First of all, an uncertainty of belonging. If territories and limits changes, in a world where mobility has become a value, what is it to be a "citadin" or a "citizen" ?
Uncertainty also refers to the question of the production and practice of security. With the growth of public-private partnership, who produces security and for whom? How does it shape a particular form of living and being in the city?
Finally, uncertainty finds a spacialized expression in the city where we witness a silent process of polishing of public space, which takes place via public policies, juridical laws, and architectural choices. This process, while it tends to produce a city without conflicts and contradictions, involves in the same time a reduction of fortuitousness. We can question the social efficiency of uncertainty in social relations against the valorisation of previsibility. The question here involves also a distinction between the formal and informal city.
The aim of this panel is to discuss how the notion of uncertainty obligates us to re-interrogate the city and can shape, or not, a particular anthropology of urban transformations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 12 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
Are uncertain urban contexts capable to open new spaces for collective (re)actions to the global city production? Through an analysis of the north eastern districts of the peripheral ring road of Paris, we will analyze the interaction between the urban politics renovation projects and the actions and perceptions of citizens inside political and public space.
Paper long abstract:
In the context of the cities analysis as places where the spatialization of global economy process and inequality take place together with new forms of social relations and citizenship (Sassen 2008), what we would like to question are the specific dynamics which take place around the construction of big urban projects.
The meantime of the political and physical conception of urban development is understood as the uncertain temporal space in which we can observe closely the power negotiations and the formation of conflictive discourses about the right to the city (Lefebvre 1968).
The proposed case study is the new renovation planning of the Parisian "boulevard périphérique", ring road built on the site of the last fortifications walls which encloses the administrative center of Paris. This renovation inter-municipal process started ten years ago, embraces an history of continuous transformations of this symbolic, physical and political limit, and, at the same time, the construction of a new vision of the Greater Paris as a global competitive metropolis.
The choice of placing the research in the uncertain time of transformation and on the uncertain thickness of the limit, will give us the possibility of taking a snapshot of the process of space production in which new potential claims arise.
What happens when a limit which used to be uncertain and unthought, becomes the center of a new reflection for the contemporary city model? Which is the place for informal liminal practices and bottom-up strategies in this political and physical urban shifting?
Paper short abstract:
The talk thematizes effects of socio-geographical marginalization in Jakarta. It juxtaposes illegal settlements to current governmental efforts to regain exclusive control over illegally used land. It is expected that the city's government will undertake stronger incursions into illegal settlements deemed ecologically precarious and deviant. The presentation discusses strategies mobilized by squatters to deal with social exclusion and the fear of eviction. Although protest appears hopeless, some residents engage in activism, creating interesting intersections with urban politics.
Paper long abstract:
Ideas detailed in the presentation draw from the results of a research project started in 2010 under the supervision of Michel Agier. Current investigations include an analysis of the Master Plan for Jakarta. It is against the background of this comprehensive plan - an artifact of top-down urban politics - that I demonstrate the manifold ways of illegal residents to deal with (economic and ecological) hardship. Their dwellings are highly uncertain places, since they are subject to state intervention and ecological degradation. How do marginalized subjects without access to legitimate political channels, deprived of citizen rights, then remain active and attentive users and manufacturers of the city?
"'Projects' emphasize agency (...) and lend voice to multiple, overlapping languages - of politics, aesthetics, irony and hope." (Simone 2011:359). Similar to the African context observed by Simone, Jakarta's illegal settlements exemplify innovative arrangements made in order to ward off the difficulties faced by poor populations: a deteriorating environment and injunctions by powerful actors. These arrangements can involve deal-making with gangsters, officials or non-profit workers. How do we account for these individual or collective "projects"? Along the lines of Chuengsatiansup's notion of collective suffering I argue that, "against the politics of exclusion, illegal residents can construct an alternative sphere of autonomy, which (...) expands to include themselves as legitimate new actors" (Chuengsatiansup 2001:68).
Such "urban politics" is still underexposed in anthropology. By pointing to a fairly unknown but richly documented locale - the metropolis Jakarta - the presentation will help to surround the workshop's focus on "uncertain spaces" with interesting reflections.
Paper short abstract:
Tent cities are an increasingly familiar feature in the US landscape, serving as a new form of home for increasing numbers of the poor. This paper considers how law's uncertain application and a "politics of show-and-tell" influence home-making activities among homeless camp dwellers.
Paper long abstract:
Recent theoretical moves to "rematerialize" anthropological analyses of sociopolitical belonging have focused on residential patterns and practices as a means to redirect attention to place and everyday life. These studies have often been based on various modes of "squatting" on land without formal recognition by the state. Yet the purported qualities of the individuals inhabiting these spaces have sometimes been underexamined in relation to the broader system of social assumptions in which they are embedded.
This paper analyzes the materiality of a homeless camp in the Midwestern US sited on land circumscribed by highways. The material practices in this interstitial space are structured by the potentiality of eviction. The landowner—a state Department of Transportation—has communicated tacit tolerance of the camp's presence as long as it actively searches for an alternative site and makes no "permanent" alterations to the land. This uncertainty has limited the kinds of home-making projects the camp, and individual residents have decided to undertake.
The political prospects of the camp are shaped by the injured social position it inhabits—"homelessness" is understood on both the Right and Left as a potentially eradicable condition given appropriate state and community interventions. Such assumptions, which view "homelessness" as an ethically transient condition instead of an inevitable consequence of neoliberalism, inheres that the camp be semiotically and materially consonant with imaginings of homelessness as a temporary problem. Paradoxically, the kinds of autoconstructed homes thus generated by such hopeful understandings of homelessness may place tent city residents at risk of harm.
Paper short abstract:
The Villa 31 is a controversially and highly emotionally discussed space. Its special location – situated directly in the wealthy centre of Buenos Aires - brings this informal settlement into the focus of a broader public. Moreover its location is essential for the understanding of the settlement and its functional logic.
Paper long abstract:
Until today the juridical status of the settlement is not decided on/ is uncertain.
Fears, prejudices and the conflict between two alien worlds - the first and the third world - play a major part in the controversy about the settlement's right of existence and the fact that it is presently not accepted. In spite of being broadly woven into the 'formal city' the Villa 31 is not seen o accepted as a part of the city structure; borders and conflict lines exist, which mark an 'inside' and an 'outside'.
How far does the city reach - where does the uncertain space begin?
To understand the relationship between the Villa 31 and the formal city their interdependences, their webbing, and their borders must be shown and read. Because of the prevalent conflicts of interest the controversy between its existing material, and above all its immaterial borders stands in the foreground.
Thesis: "In the long run a consolidation - the real acceptance of the Villa 31 - is only possible if the material as well as the immaterial borders between the settlement and Buenos Aires are questioned."
[Where] do connections, interdependences but also borders between the formal and the informal city exist?
[How] do they manifest on the material and immaterial level?
Paper short abstract:
Are urban wastelands spaces of uncertainty in the city? How do they isolate and make the planned and controlled city penetrable for people who are evicted of housing? What disturbs us in those uncertain spaces? Drawing on this, what can we learn concerning the making of the contemporary city?
Paper long abstract:
The urban transformation of the city produces constantly uncertain spaces: urban wastelands. Without definite function, neither exploited nor productive, these spaces have no recognised use. Not qualified in the urban plan, not represented on the city map, they are undetermined spaces. Their existence is limited but undefined. It's often difficult to reach them physically, and it's illegal to penetrate them. They are isolated spaces out of determinated, regulated and planned city.
But, as they are situated in the middle of the city, they become indispensable opportunities for inhabitants who don't have other solutions for living and who will implant themselves in this in-between of the urban planning. These habitations are also uncertain: materially precarious, fragile spatially and temporally. The inhabitants are constantly evicted: Whilst escaping the surveillance of the power, they are not completely out of its reach.
What is it to be a "citadin" (feeling to belonging to) without being a "citizen" (without right to the city)? How is it to experience the tensions between the planned and controlled city on the one hand, and the undetermined and uncertain city on the other?
The presence of these habitations and inhabitants disturb. In the media and in public discourses, they are visible in the event of crisis - extreme cold, fire, overcrowded in insalubrity, social misery - put on the public space the figure of the stranger and its collective representation. What does the link between right and norm tell us about uncertain and disquieting habitations in the city?
Paper short abstract:
With this paper I would like to discuss the role of disquieting policies of uncertain spaces through a case-study of the small catalan town of Salt. The aim is to shed light upon processes of space production in the post-fordist economy and context of economic and political crisis.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years efforts have been made to expel all disturbing behaviour from public space as a strategy towards a pacification of spaces in the post-fordist cities with the aim of tourist consumption. But how do you understand these strategies when tourism is not present neither an aim?
In the last two years smaller incidents have drawn attention to the specific ecology of the town where I am doing fieldwork (Salt, Spain). There is a general consent that this town is a kind of social laboratory due to the following facts: 1) there has been an increasing sense of insecurity on the one hand amongst a smaller part of the population, elder people and formerly immigrants from the rest of Spain, 2) simultaneously a perception of despair and distrust reigns amongst young people, mainly children of immigrants from North Africa and South America.
With this paper I attempt to show that Salt is represented as a dangerous place (a paradigmatic disquiet and uncertain space in uncertain times) which calls for domestication through various social policies. The point is that due to a certain negative vision of social conflict, shared by the major political parties, conflict is avoided and even silenced through repressive measures and social policies that are supposed to trigger social cohesion.
This kind of cover-up of latent conflicts produces a greater incomprehension, possibly an even greater annoyance, on part of the "native" population, and furthermore, less interaction between the conflictual parts.
Paper short abstract:
Parisian parks and public gardens are landscapes where citizenship and national belonging is cultivated and naturalized. This paper examines how contestation surrounding a new park in a multi-ethnic neighborhood exposes tensions between alternative forms of belonging and assimilation.
Paper long abstract:
Urban parks and public gardens have long been regimented spaces where dominant regimes attempt to fix the socio-political spontaneity of the sidewalk and street. Parks and gardens are places where power acts through landscape, nature, monumentality, and surveillance to create a citizenry. But what happens when public gardens are created to serve a population whose membership in the nation is contested and whose citizenship is an object of struggle? This paper examines efforts to "green" a largely post-industrial, Maghrebi and West African district of Paris, and it focuses on the conflict and negotiations between designers, public authorities, and neighborhood residents in the planning and operation of a new park. In situations where the citizenship of the residents is contested, the question of who defines the political and cultural meaning of the public garden becomes uncertain and open to change.
Paper short abstract:
This paper, by focusing on how noncitizens claim rights to the city, while circumventing uncertainty, calls for an interrogation on ideas of belonging to a city.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic data, the paper illustrates how street vendors, day labourers, unlicensed motorists assert their presence in Los Angeles, California in the context of recession and anti-immigrant legislations and city ordinances. This paper, by focusing on how noncitizens claim rights to the city, while circumventing uncertainty, calls for an interrogation on ideas of belonging to a city. Furthermore, the paper by examining the presence of informal economies also questions the distinctions between the 'formal' and the 'informal' city. More specifically, the paper shows how undocumented women street vendors collectively negotiate with restaurant managers, recreation park staff, and the police and manage to sell prepared traditional foods in the streets of Los Angeles. Day labourers continue to gather on street corners and in parking structures even when prospects of day work increasingly dims. The paper illustrates how in the absence of a formal support structure in the city, they collectively support each other and form friendships and informal networks which help them tide over uncertain moments. Finally, the paper illustrates how undocumented immigrants who are unlicensed assert their rights to mobility in Los Angeles -even though the state of California does not issue drivers' licenses to noncitizens. They challenge city ordinances which allow imposition of heavy penalties for driving without licenses. There have been some scholars who have recognized the rights of undocumented immigrants but less work has been done on the topic of belonging, rights, and citizenship in cities.