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- Convenors:
-
Ana Luísa Micaelo
(University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL))
Rita Cachado (ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon)
Giacomo Pozzi (IULM University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Aula Magna-Spelbomskan
- Sessions:
- Friday 17 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
We are looking for anthropological insights concerning housing vulnerability - centred on histories of eviction, displacement and resistance - in different European countries, with focus on the analytical debate about the capacity of housing policies to promote stability, mobility or settlement.
Long Abstract:
On one hand, as a symbolic, social and spatial phenomenon, housing vulnerability and eviction are particular forms of forced mobility loaded with great anthropological significance. On the other hand, different housing policies, implemented in tension between rights and contention, markets and families (houses as assets/homes), hold a privileged task in governing the population, by determining both mobility and settling processes.
In this sense, housing represents a material, political and symbolic crux in social and economic mobility, establishing the political boundaries of those who are seen as eligible buyers, (il)legitimate dwellers, natives or newcomers. Therefore, defining those who should "stay" and those who should "move".
In this panel we are looking for anthropological insights concerning housing vulnerability - centred on histories of eviction, displacement and resistance - in different European countries, with focus on the analytical debate about the capacity of housing policies to promote stability, mobility or settlement. We are interested in addressing the different temporalities of such policies, whether in the short time of personal and family experiences or at the long-term of generations, neighbourhoods and cities, and other ties of social and local belonging. The focus is on the variety of European practices, yet other empirical and comparative data addressing these topics will be welcome.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 17 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
Departing from an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study of asylum seeker receptions in Norway, this paper explores the housing and arrival infrastructures as it is shaped by and shapes the political and social boundaries of those who are seen as eligible and (il)legitimate dwellers and newcomers.
Paper long abstract:
Departing from an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study of asylum seeker receptions in Norway, this paper explores the housing and arrival infrastructures as it is shaped by and shapes the political and social boundaries of those who are seen as eligible and (il)legitimate dwellers and newcomers. Housing, places and the arrival infrastructures are both catalysts and embodiments of societal change and includes both micro-local and macro-global transformations that rescale and reshape social space and the redrawing of the layout and social composition of places. Arrival infrastructures and residential environments do not only express cultural values, but also shape conditions for group- and individual identities and belonging, active (inter)relations and interplay as they stay or move on. This affects possibilities for just and equal influence and participation in political and civil associations, and access to education, work, health and social services, leisure activities and soci
al networks. The paper argues that the structure and quality of asylum seekers’ arrival and accommodation become a mode of governing, and as such represent a “politics of discomfort. More so, the paper emphasizes the ethic and aesthetic dimensions of infrastructures and built environment’s interplay in communicating social identity, stigma, power relations and citizenship. Overarching, the paper highlights how asylum seekers’ housing, arrival structures and residential environments promote instability and insecurity more than stability and settlement, thus, challenging senses of belonging and wellbeing.
Paper short abstract:
The new house for Roma replaced former "Roma settlement". Based on ethnographic data, we try to reconstruct the most important moments of this investment from different points of view: Roma, local authorities, non-Roma neighborhood, Roma leaders, academic experts.
Paper long abstract:
The paper traces social context of the project on improving extreme poor Roma dwelling conditions by Polish authorities. Taking into consideration the specificity of the situation of the Polish Roma minority, which in fact is relatively small, largely culturally diverse and territorially distributed, we undertook the anthropological field study in a mountain village of Bergitka Roma settlement with more than one hundred years of history. The new house for Roma replaced former "Roma settlement" (composed of makeshift houses/cabins) a part of the Carpathian Village populated by highlanders majority. According to policy decision makers former "Roma houses" were not considered appropriate for habitation. At present about 80 Roma live in the multi-dwelling building. The building includes 12 rather small apartments in total. The entire project has been implemented with funds from the Roma integration program by the Ministry of the Interior and Administration.
In the paper we present ethnographic material obtained during field research carried out in 1994-2017. Based on ethnographic data, we try to reconstruct the most important moments of this investment from different points of view: Roma, local authorities, non-Roma neighborhood, Roma leaders, academic experts. In this case, we show how the ambitious housing policy undoubtedly leads to improving the living standards of Roma, however, it does not actually increase the extent of their integration. Very recently the fence panels surrounded "the Roma possession"; both sides interpret the fact in own but rather paradox manner.
Paper short abstract:
The housing estate Gellerup in Aarhus, Denmark, is under transformation. Heavy investments in infrastructure in conjunction with other efforts are to transform Gellerup from "disadvantaged estate to attractive neighborhood". But the residents are ambiguous about their place in the future estate.
Paper long abstract:
The affordable housing estate Gellerup in Aarhus, Denmark, is under transformation. Heavy investments in new infrastructure, new buildings and refurbishments of the apartments in conjunction with social efforts are intended to transform Gellerup from "disadvantaged estate to attractive neighborhood".
But many residents with immigrant background fear they do not have a place in the future attractive neighborhood. That attractiveness is estimated on the percentage of immigrant residents among other factors, as social mixing has become a way of dealing with estates like Gellerup.
Where the transformation of estates like Gellerup is framed as a solution to the clustering of problems like unemployment, high crime levels and lack of integration, some of the residents with immigrant background feel exposed and fear that the transformations will lead to a worsening of their situation or even their eventual removal from the estate. At the same time, many acknowledge that transformations are needed and welcome many of the initiatives of the Master Plan.
The transformations of the Master Plan are currently "betwixt and between" to use a phrase from Victor Turner. This means that the residents, both of Danish and immigrant descent, are in a position where both negative and positive outcomes of the initiatives are imaginable, where the future can seem both insecure and full of positive potential. In the midst of the transformations, hope and fear, optimism and pessimism coexist and converge in the long-term perspectives of planning and the shorter term perspectives of dwelling.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation explores the relation between experiences of vulnerability and resistance, regarding people in different kinds of housing mobility in urban settings, reflecting on these experiences as social, political, personal and body responses to excluding urban politics.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation explores analytically the relation between experiences of vulnerability and resistance, regarding housing processes (or the obstacle to it) for people in different kinds of mobility in urban settings. Drawing reflections from different ethnographic contexts in which we have been working we intend to reflect upon the contours of these experiences - vulnerability as much as resistance in face of housing constraints - and how they emerge as social, political, personal and body responses to excluding urban politics.
The lack of places to inhabit, temporary housing solutions[, or the precarious conditions one has to endure, produce or are produced by a constant mobility, either through homelessness, migration and remigration. These conditions are experienced differently according to (i) the level of physical and mental exposure people are submitted to; to (ii) the temporality of the mobility paths and projects; and (iii) the type of relation/confrontation with housing policies. Here, the aim is to understand: what are the strategies of settling within a dynamics of constant mobility? How vulnerability and resistance intersect the daily lives of people living in this temporal and spatial conditions in the cities? How vulnerability is expressed and qualified in these different settings?
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I intend to analyze the Italian context - through the case study of the city of Milan - as a privileged site to understand the social value of "housing career" to improve or obstruct local mobility.
Paper long abstract:
The recent economic crisis has not only caused the real estate market collapse, it has also made it more difficult for tenants to bear the economic burden of paying rent [Tosi 2017]. Recent data presented by the Ministry of the Interior confirm that in Milan in 2015 there were 32,249 requests for eviction (sfratto) [Ministry of Interiors 2016]. At the same time, data from the Municipality of Milan show that an increasing number of citizens are applying for the assignment of a social housing. Nowadays more than 25,000 families are registered on the waiting lists [Éupolis Lombardia 2015].
In this context, an ethnographic perspective is a vehicle for
conveying the socio-political value of home and "home loss" in the everyday life [Desmond 2016] as much as for understanding the relationship of power between the State (and its agents) and citizens [Fassin 2015]. According to this perspective, as Carsten stated, homes "embody the interconnections between individual trajectories, kinship
and the state" [Carsten 2018: 103].
In this paper I intend to analyze the Italian context - through the case study of the city of Milan - as a privileged site to understand the social value of "housing career" to improve or obstruct local mobility. In this configuration evictions play a symbolic and material role. Evictions represent fundamental rites of institution [Bourdieu 1993] that structure the social possibility of individual or familiar stability, mobility or settlement. As rites, evictions contribute to the formulation of politics and practices of inclusion and exclusion.
Paper short abstract:
Despite promises of social democratic forms of urban planning, the local population of the Risk Zone Urban Renewal Project in Eskişehir, Turkey has been exposed to multiple forms of vulnerability. This paper investigates lack of resistance and questions role of disaster narratives in this process.
Paper long abstract:
After the 2011 earthquake in Eastern-Anatolia, the national and local governments of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) propounded disaster narratives and a need for creating safer cities through urban renewal projects. Already in 2012, the government enacted a very debatable Law no:6306 - "Renewal Law" - despite large criticisms. In 2013, the Metropolitan Municipality in Eskişehir, ruled by the social democrats (Republican People's Party - CHP) introduced the Risky Zone Urban Renewal Project by utilizing the same law regardless of its politically oppositional stance. Yet the municipality claimed to apply a risk-free, social-democratic, and participatory project which alleged to become a role-model project.
Since 2013, however, the planning stages of the project have been secretive, participation promises have been exclusive for upper classes, and the local population will need to make payments of undetermined amounts, facing risks of dispossession and displacement. Over the last five years, the project still has not proceeded with renewal plans and policies, while the locals' properties have been annotated, existing constructions stopped without permission to proceed further, and property buying and selling activities have become almost impossible. Questions also emerged about evictions and resettlement.
Despite several forms of vulnerability and ever-lasting waiting period of the local population, however, the project has not inspired collective movements or conflicts. This paper discusses lack of mobilization despite uncertainties of policies and vulnerabilities while asking how disaster narratives influenced the local perception of risk and how alarms about future calamities entangle with positionalities of the local population.
Paper short abstract:
Ten years after the global financial crisis emerged, I'll address the way in which to buy a house in Portugal, seen intersubjectively as a safe investment in real estate, family savings and heritage, turns out to be a nexus of endless indebtedness, and a real chance of eviction and displacement.
Paper long abstract:
Portugal has one of the highest rates of house ownership in Europe. Once housing mortgage and credit encouraging were seen as an effective public policy to offset the absence of a social housing policy, the process known as financialization took over Portuguese household strategies entailed in credit, making no distinction between the upper, middle and working classes, nor between workers and the unemployed, retirees and social grant beneficiaries. For decades, to get a mortgage loan to buy a house was a decision based on an effective economic rationality. Ten years after the global financial crisis emerged, I'll address the way in which to own a house, seen intersubjectively as a safe investment in real estate, family savings and heritage, turns out to be a nexus of endless indebtedness, a real chance of home-loss and personal insolvency. Increasing about 400% per year, insolvency is a technical euphemism for family bankruptcy, meaning, for those affected, eviction, displacement and total dispossession, court guardianship, new dependencies and moral meanings, great sorrow and social suffering. In addition, and despite the considerable changes in recent public policy orientations in Portugal, the total number of evictions (which includes those carried out by the state, as well as by banks and other private institutions) is rarely calculated and even less debated. Drawing on fieldwork among crisis-afflicted and indebted households in Lisbon since 2015, this paper addresses the dilemma of the foreclosure and eviction of the «family house» and the invisibility of the displaced.
Paper short abstract:
Post-socialist ownership liberalization, the ethos of privatism and absence of official housing policy created "new" urban vulnerables: the non-owners. Focusing on various regimes of in/out, local/global and owner/non-owner, the paper will examine the specificities of housing market in Prague.
Paper long abstract:
In the course of 2016, housing prices in Prague started to grow rapidly, as a result of long-term pressure generated by various factors such as stagnation of construction industry, a constant influx of newcomers, speculations, shared economy platforms, etc. These globally embedded processes brought to light almost forgotten urban vulnerables: the non-owners. Those who were not lucky and rich enough to buy a flat became suddenly threatened by the housing market instability.
Prague's current housing situation emerged from the post-socialist way of ownership liberalization and deregulation, often labelled as a regime of privatism (Hirt 2012). After the 40-year period of state-driven socialist ownership, 1990's and 2000's privatization transformed approx. 90% of housing stock into a private property. Private ownership was thus rediscovered as a component of social status while simultaneously both city and the state abandoned any pro-active housing policy.
Based on fieldwork conducted on peripheries of Prague, my presentation will focus on various forms of housing vulnerability in Prague. A situation of 40 year old non-owner, mother of two children, who was forced to move out from suburban housing estate and resettle in the countryside, will be confronted with the strategies and practices of the "newcomers" - post-Soviet region immigrants who are moving in and settling or even buying flats in similar suburban housing estates. Examined through individual spatialities, temporalities, and hybrid regimes of in/out, local/global, owner/non-owner the paper will reveal the ways of staying, moving and settling in the context of overheated post-socialist housing market.