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- Convenors:
-
Barbara Heer
(University of Basel)
Christine Moderbacher (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Halle)
Sandra Staudacher (University of Basel)
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- Discussant:
-
Ana Aceska
(Humboldt University Berlin)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- U6-28
- Start time:
- 21 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Rome
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
By focusing on strategies and practices of marginalized urban dwellers, this panel proposes new anthropological perspectives on contemporary urbanity that aim to decentre hegemonic knowledge about the city.
Long Abstract:
Contestations over space, political power and other resources lead in many places to processes of inclusion and exclusion, which place some social groups at the urban centres and others at the urban margins. How urban dwellers from different walks of life, equipped with different resources, live together in the cities in the Global North and the Global South is therefore a key question, which needs to be addressed in order to understand contemporary urbanity and to shape cities of the future.
Urban margins can refer to segregated, poor neighbourhoods ('ghettos', 'slums'); to urban dwellers who lack state citizenship ('sans papiers', asylum seekers) or other groups whose right to the city become contested. urban margins may refer to inhabitants whose access to the city's spaces and resources is restricted (homeless people, the elderly, women, youth). Urban margins are in continuous flux, shaping and shaped by the city's dynamics; who stands at the centre and who at the margins is not least the outcome of contestations, negotiations, and dissolutions enacted through the urbanites' social practices.
We invite papers which provide empirically grounded accounts of urban margins in cities across the globe. We are especially interested in papers which show empirically that urban inhabitants living at the margins of a city do not at all represent negligible minorities of the urban whole, but contest and subvert periphery-centre relations through their strategies and practices.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The notion of marginality is applied to Global South metropoles at the core of neoliberal restructuration of urban space. The paper presents a working-class quarter in Sudan capital Khartoum. Fieldwork shows the need of seizing marginality from spatial to socio-cultural and political perspectives
Paper long abstract:
In Greater Khartoum a booming expansion in recent years (and the flow of IDPs, refugees, environmental migrants) brings the marks of a harsh differentiation due to neoliberal policies, repression and exclusion dynamics. Rather than on the multiple spatially marginal places where « new-comers » are confined, the paper focuses on a central quarter of the capital, Deim, whose particular history and social composition invite to rethink the notion of marginality. Qualified as a multi-ethnic quarter, Deim was created during British colonization by the planned resettlement of slums (mainly inhabited by ancient military slaves from different Sudanese regions) and became progressively the bulk of an early local working-class. This original location at the margins of the city changed drastically with the recent expansion of urban limits. Today, under pressures of gentrification, the inhabitants of Deim, while striving to keep their entitlement to land (suddenly attractive for new urban middle-classes for its spatial centrality), keep as a marker of their collective memory their former marginal location and the common experience of early displacement, refuse their marginalization as a "mixed" community in the stigmatization by the Arabic Islamic elite, and still claim their "centrality" as working-class and highly politicized neighbourhood where a national Sudanese identity has been built against exclusive tribal, ethnic and religious divides dominating in other contexts of the country. Based on a long fieldwork (2008-2015) the paper illustrate a particular configuration of "marginal" urban groups and propose to seize « marginality » from spatial to socio-cultural, historical and political perspective.
Paper short abstract:
Irregular migrants’ urban protests show us how urban margins can play a significant role in shaping and contesting the city, but particularly also point out the need for studying the ways boundaries and meaning between the urban centre and periphery are constantly shifting and being contested.
Paper long abstract:
This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork, focuses on the urban practices of irregular migrants in Brussels, and particularly pays attention to those spatial practices used to counter and contest exclusion. Considered "illegal" and "non-citizens", and severely excluded from the city in economic, political and social ways, irregular migrants notably find themselves living at the urban margins. Yet, oftentimes, they actively engage in mobilizations and urban protests, to claim a legal residence (through regularization), but also to express demands for urban belonging and citizenship, advocating instead a citizenship regime based on their residence and presence within the city (a politics of the urban inhabitant, Purcell). In Brussels, these urban protests (marches, demonstrations, the occupation of buildings) often take place in the inner city (mostly tolerated by the authorities, yet at times prohibited); the House of Migrants e.g., a former government building occupied by irregular migrants, is situated next to the Avenue Louise, the city's most prestigious and expensive shopping street. As such, these spatial practices show us how urban margins are significant in shaping the city at large, but above all force us to rethink what makes up the urban centre and periphery. Rather than looking at urban margins as consisting mostly of geographically secluded localities, such as poor neighborhoods, attention also needs to be paid to those spaces (often invisible) of urban margins within the centre of the city, as well as the ways boundaries, power relations, and meaning between urban centre and periphery are constantly shifting and being contested.
Paper short abstract:
This contribution explores how local community currencies are used as resistance practices against the neo-liberal dominance of the city by applying Harvey's concept to the right of the city to the analysis of the Brixton Pound in London.
Paper long abstract:
This research explores how local community currencies are used as resistance practices against the neo-liberal dominance of the city by applying Harvey's concept to the right of the city to the analysis of the Brixton Pound in London.
The city is a site of political struggle. The concept of the right to the city developed by Harvey (2013) demands the right to change the city for urban dwellers, as our ways of life are influenced by the urban structures around us. Susser and Tonnelat (2013) developed this concept into three urban commons; common reliance on public services; use of shared public space; and collective artistic mobilisation. The progressive undermining of these commons has elicited a consciousness that has led to creative forms of resistance to counter the neo-liberal hegemony of the city. In this respect the city is the site of political struggle on political, economic and social fronts.
The Brixton pound (B£) is a local complementary currency started in 2009. It developed from the Transition Town group in the area, a movement which seeks to foster economic and social resilience. It was the first example of a local community currency in an urban area in the UK. In what ways does the B£ represent resistance against the neo-liberal dominance of the city? Is it part of a struggle for the urban commons? This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork with small traders in the Brixton area.
Paper short abstract:
The paper invites to rethink the city based on mental maps of Roma and non-Roma children who live on the 'peripheries' of Naples (IT) and Pécs (HU). It offers a new image of the cities, neighborhoods, research sites: takes the children's point of view, the 'periphery' as the center of experiences.
Paper long abstract:
The paper offers a reflection on the city as such based on the mental maps of Roma and non-Roma children from the 'peripheries' of Naples and Pécs. These territories belong to the city but are excluded and/or stigmatized within the city's image. While in Pécs we talk about "Roma neighborhoods" as peripheries, in Naples the Roma camp has its symbolic and physical confines within/from the ghettos of Neapolitans.
The mental maps offer an insight into what children imagine as their city and/or neighborhood, how do they construct it and what kind of spatial experiences they have. I invite to look at the mental maps as starting points for deconstructing our image of the city and take the children's point of view: looking at the 'periphery' as it appears in their drawings: as the center of experiences. We can take into account for example the semi-rural characteristics of certain places that challenge our idea of city and its margins. The popular cultures of the periphery- e.g. hypermarkets - are generally excluded from the cities' promoted cultural image though have a strong importance in the lived experiences of children.
The preparation of mental maps (with collaborative analysis) is part of my PhD research that has been realized since 2011 on the discursive and regulative effect of Roma educational (and not) policies on the lived experiences and strategies of Roma students and the other actors of education on the urban margins of Naples and Pécs.
Paper short abstract:
Elderly people often live at social margins. This paper uses elderhood in the city of Zanzibar, Tanzania as a lens to analyze urban life and shows how some elderly people are able to respond to marginality caused by health problems, frailty and poverty with transnational and cosmopolitan capacities.
Paper long abstract:
Elderly people are typically not the first social group that comes to our mind if we think of cities and their inhabitants. The widespread oblivion of elderly people in urban research and policy is surprising since they constitute a growing section of the urban population and can be encountered in a variety of spaces and neighborhoods across cities. This paper argues that urban elderhood is a fruitful, unusual lens to study urban life, especially when interested in how cities are experience, lived and worked on by urban dwellers at the social margins. It draws on ethnographic research in the city of Zanzibar (Tanzania), an East African island in the Indian Ocean. Many elderly urbaners experience frailty, serious health problems or even disablement and cannot work anymore or make a living. They shift towards social margins and become dependent on their social environment in a context in which state institutions are weak and thus pension schemes and health insurances are not widespread. Urban elders need to find alternative practices of coping with aging and care receiving. Some are able to maintain social networks stretching across neighborhoods, urban-rural areas and even across continents and can for example access cosmopolitan knowledge, goods or even arrange medical treatments to cope with critical moments in their aging process. Nevertheless, also localized spaces like neighborhoods do besides their direct impact on the accessibility of state services (hospitals, public transport etc) and other urban amenities (jobs, shops etc.) play a key role in shaping transnational and cosmopolitan agentic capacities.
Paper short abstract:
Through the figure of the antropófago, the wo/man eater, the aims of this presentation are twofold: to account for the strategies and tactics that the young of a favela undertake so as to meet their desires, and to explore the potentialities and relations between anthropology and anthropófagia.
Paper long abstract:
"I am only interested in what's not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal." (de Andrade, 1928)
Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, in his Cannibalist Manifesto, or Manifesto Antropófago employed the figure of the anthropófago, from the greek anthropos, for man, and fagein, for eating, so as to designate, or further instigate, an inversion of the power relations between the culture of the colonizer and the colonized, the masters and the slaves, the authentic and the mimetic. The favelas of Rio de Janeiro have ever since the 1980s been going through the 'territorialization' of the cocaine trade, implying socio-spatial control therein being conducted by armed traffickers, feeding further into their material and symbolic marginalization. With the raised influx of tourists during past and upcoming mega-events, the governmental interest in taking control over such territories came to result in the 2008 law enforcement programme, or the 'pacification'. At the interstices of the conflict and cohort of armed drug trafficking and crime prevention and containment projects, in this presentation I invoke the (albeit gendered) figure of the antropófago to account for the ever shifting strategies and tactics that the young of a favela have undertaken so as to augment their prospects and meet their material and symbolic desires and make themselves. I also explore my own role as an (female) anthropological antropófago, and ultimately, of the practices of social scientists as anthropófagia, an act unmooring axioms of power, creation and representation.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focusses on a marginal Viennese neighborhood called “Kreta”. It shows how in this specific location resident migrants could become key players in real estate development through the link of two features: The knowledge of their neighborhood and their integration into transnational networks.
Paper long abstract:
The paper looks at the role of migrants in processes of urban renewal, without taking one predefined migrant group or one city as point of departure. The entry point will be the transformation of a marginal urban location, namely of a Viennese neighborhood called "Kreta" (Island of Crete). There are several explanations for its denomination but most of them refer to two aspects: The traditionally isolated position inside the city and the low-income, predominantly migrant population. Today, one third of the residents are migrants from Southeastern Europe and Turkey. The paper looks at the ongoing remaking of the area which is determined be the reuse of several urban brownfields surrounding the neighborhood. I will show how "Kreta's" migrant residents managed to anticipate these renewal processes through the link of two features: The knowledge of their neighborhood and their integration into transnational networks. Thanks to this juncture, companies owned by resident migrants could anticipate other, larger players in the real estate development of the "Island of Crete". Interestingly, the still peripheral location of the neighborhood offered great security for investments, which facilitated the attraction of capital through transnational networks. The paper, thus, shows how the particular location allowed migrants to become agents of urban development beyond the traditional roles ascribed to them in urban and migration narratives. This dynamic is played out between the "Island of Crete's" marginality in the city and a potential, new centrality in a transnational context.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses urban marginality and the complex interplay between spatial and social marginalisation in Kuwait. Drawing on case studies of two marginalised groups and their space making practices, it explores the relation of urban margins to both the urban as well as the political centre.
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses two case studies of urban marginality in Kuwait City that shed light on the complex interplay between spatial and social marginalisation: First, Taima, a marginalised area inhabited by bedoon (literally the "without", i.e. without citizenship, which mainly refers to former nomads without citizenship). The neighbourhood displays a striking lack of infrastructural supplies and has been as one of the main centres of bedoon protests since 2011. Second, the case of migrant workers who "take over" the (administrative and commercial) centre of Kuwait City on Fridays on their day off and as such appropriate space through their presence (Falk 2014, Bayat 2010).
Both case studies thus display different articulated claims for participation (social and spatial) by marginalised groups as well as their social relation to a "centre", here both the urban and the political. The paper consequently argues that the study of urban marginality helps in better understanding the urban centre and its transformation (see Chapatte 2015, ZMO programmatic paper) and beyond that also illuminates key political controversies - such as citizenship in Kuwait - in their spatial dimension.
Paper short abstract:
In a city where hegemonic discourse is of conflict and post-conflict, the stories of ordinary lives are pushed to the narratorial margin. In Belfast, a public-storytelling night creates an opportunity for people to negotiate their lifeworlds and create a communitas outwith the divided city.
Paper long abstract:
Belfast, Northern Ireland: A city much written about (academically, literary, journalistically) as a divided city, an arena for ongoing conflict, and as a city dealing in different ways with post-conflict reconciliation. It is important these issues are understood, but the Grand Narratives of conflict and post-conflict, of Catholic versus Protestant, are not necessarily in accord with people's mundane experience. Academic, literary and newsworthy Belfast has drowned out other voices, other stories, those of the everyday lives of people in the city. Their stories dwell on the narratorial margin. What anthropological knowledge is revealed when we disinter the mundane? Ten By Nine is a monthly public-storytelling night in Belfast that showcases true and personal stories, a juxtaposition of quotidian stories - funny, sad, educational - that illustrates people's lifeworlds, a genre of storytelling that challenges the hegemonic discourse and moves these marginalized stories to centre stage. Drawing on ethnographic examples I argue that in retelling Belfast at Ten By Nine, the quotidian opens up a realm for dialogue that does not transcend past (and ongoing) conflict - we do not know necessarily who has been touched by it and how - but it offers a way for people to negotiate their lifeworlds and to create a communitas in the interstices of the Grand Narratives. A space is opened up to share life as lived and for troubles with a small 't' to be aired. Storytelling, an ancient Irish oral culture, becomes a new form of symbolic practice.