Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Christoph Brumann
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle)
Felix Girke (HTWG Konstanz and Allegra Lab)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-E397
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Efforts to edit the past (e.g. by conserving heritage) and shape the future (e.g. by ambitious planning) often unfold simultaneously in urban spaces. Based on ethnographic observation, the panel explores the interplay between different time horizons in contemporary cities.
Long Abstract:
Cities often push the here and now onto their inhabitants and visitors, overwhelming them with dense and diverse impressions and experiences. But they are also places oriented towards a chronological elsewhere, having a past and aspiring to a future that may be no less on people's minds. This panel seeks to explore the complex interrelations - not necessarily antithetical only - between multiple urban time horizons. Some cities live predominantly off the past, enshrining their historical buildings and cultural specifics that engender local pride and foreign admiration (e.g. Venice, Kyoto or Marrakesh). Others, instead, embrace the future in the form of spectacular projects and innovative planning (e.g. Dubai, Astana or Brasilia). Most cities, however, do both at the same time, and contemporary urban branding often aims at a judicious balance between the conservation of selected heritage items and the promise that architecture, neighbourhoods, and cultural styles are at the forefront of trendiness and innovation.
We call for ethnographically grounded contributions that analyse this interplay. Possible foci include the political and financial dynamics and the politicians, developers, conservationists, planners, builders, and real estate brokers that most directly influence the physical shape and larger visions of the city, as well as ordinary residents' or visitors' takes on, and engagement with, these larger processes and the ensuing phenomena such as commercialisation, gentrification, displacement, and resistance. What does having one foot in the past and one in the future imply for urban presents?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the interplay between contemporary 'neoliberal' everyday life and a social housing infrastructure projected into a socialist reality that never came true. The analysis focus on the meaning and experience of utopia in material chronological perspective.
Paper long abstract:
The profound neoliberal reforms imposed during Pinochet's dictatorship and that have since perpetuated been in democracy are palpable in the ordering of urban space in Chile. Among other things, the subsidiary role of state housing policies and socio-economic segregation mark people's everyday lives, expressions of citizenship and imagination of the future. Yet, this neoliberal landscape coexists with 'revolutionary ruins' from the past where former governments invested in ambitious infrastructure projects that aimed at materializing the nation-state otherwise. The paper offers an ethnographic analysis of a social housing project in the city of Quilpué financed by a Soviet donation during Allende's revolutionary government (1970-1973). Today, families inhabit the departments where the walls are made of so-called KPD panels, produced in Chile under Soviet supervision. The aim of the project was to provide an affordable collective housing alternative for the working class - a denser and more dynamic 'city of the future' that would in turn facilitate the 'Chilean road to socialism' and the creation of a New Man. The paper discusses the interplay between contemporary 'neoliberal' everyday life and a infrastructure projected into a socialist reality that never came true. The departments both evoke nostalgia of another and more heterogeneous form of urban life and fear of this imagined reality among the inhabitants, local politicians, former factory workers and urban planners that engage with the area; and from an anthropological perspective the KDP panels invite us to engage the analysis of the meaning and experience of utopia in material chronological perspective.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the phenomenon of urban standstill in the German city of Bremerhaven. It presents the Goethe-district's many scrap-houses as ruins of anticipated gentrification, which maintain the current inhabitants' local futures by delaying the gentrification everybody continues to foresee.
Paper long abstract:
The Goetheviertel is the poorest district of Germany's poorest city, the postindustrial harbour city of Bremerhaven. However, for many local inhabitants it is also the city's most beautiful district with its 19th century architecture and central location, and any visitor of Bremerhaven would agree: this district is ripe for gentrification. Gentrification has been anticipated at least since the 1980s when the city declared the Goetheviertel to be an investment area. Investors from all over the world bought property in the district, but, as many inhabitants underline today, they never invested anything into the maintenance of their houses. The results are ruins of pre-gentrification: houses that materialise the absence of gentrification with their ongoing decay. These houses, as many of the people living in the district, might still await a better future, but for them time has run out. Their deterioration has deemed them scrap ('Schrott'-) houses that are legally uninhabitable. They epitomize the standstill in urban renovation that dominates both district and city. However, this absence also produces spaces for those who are usually excluded from a gentrified future. The scrap houses' material qualities therefore maintain the current district inhabitants' local futures by delaying the gentrification everybody continues to foresee. The result is a standstill in urban development that nonetheless demands investments in the future by renovating its built inheritance from the past. This paper explores the many failed and partially successful attempts by local residents and urban planners to, finally, take this district into the future.
Paper short abstract:
Numerous recent coffee-table books reduce modernizing Yangon (Myanmar) to a crumbling relic that demands rescue and preservation. Their transient western creators merge urban and personal time horizons and commit their subject positions to a salvage project of a city that changes too fast for them.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, numerous glossy coffee-table books have presented the city of Yangon, the former capital of Myanmar, as a crumbling city rather than a developing one. They describe it as 'timeless', not future-oriented, as a 'a city to rescue' within a perpetually closing window, rather than a beacon of modernity. The authors and photographers are Europeans, Americans, and Australians, and in their work, they temporalize the former capital of Myanmar similarly and specifically: documenting aspects of 'pastness' still present in contemporary Yangon through narratives of their personal immersion into the city, they emphasize the need to salvage ways of life or particular buildings for the future. Inquiry into the subjectivities, motivations and interests of the creators links these publications to larger questions of nostalgia, neo-colonial imagination, and the Western gaze. It also assesses the rhetorical means by which the present and past of Yangon are actively conflated in these publications, as urban and personal time horizons merge. The production and consumption of these coffee-table books and their selective retrotopias constitute (from the expatriate-accessible fringes of Myanmar society) a mode of coping with the rapid social changes usually labeled as the 'opening up' or 'transition' of the country. The coffee-table breaks through into lived environments mostly in local exhibitions and book launches, as well as the para-ethnographic research undertaken for the books. The latter presents a positional challenge to critical heritage research in Yangon that seeks to stay aloof of heritage promotion.
Paper short abstract:
Kyoto was subject to intense modern redevelopment but citizen protest led to a new planning regime seeking links with the rich history, supported by most residents. The paper explores the contradictions of the respective social process and of current appropriations of local traditions by newcomers.
Paper long abstract:
For a city living off its reputation as the stronghold of history and tradition, Kyoto has seen quite a bit of contention over its built environment, with modernist planning and high-rise construction increasingly transforming the city through the 1980s and 1990s. Citizen protest facilitated intense debate so that with national legislation changing, Kyoto City revised its planning policies in the 2000s. Kyoto specificity was reinterpreted as a positive value and the future of the city came to be sought in linking up with its rich history, such as by restoring the traditional town houses and using their designs in new buildings. Since then, tourism has skyrocketed, construction and real estate did not enter the predicted slump, population decline ended, and sworn critics of the new planning regime are nowhere to be found. The paper will show that the social process was nonetheless contradictory: civil society groups were indispensable for kicking off the debate but despite the city administration's professed commitment to participatory approaches, key decisions were taken in a fairly top-down mode. And the new supporters of traditionality are often those who lack own roots in Kyoto's past, so that "vicarious tradition" becomes a major force in the city's ongoing regeneration.
Paper short abstract:
How are different forms of movement, circulation and flow - or their opposites (confinement, stasis, disconnection) associated with different temporalities and understandings of the future in contemporary cities? This paper examines this question through an ethnography of a market space in Colombo.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when projects of urban development and beautification constrain rather than free urban residents? When the ideals of smooth, frictionless movement and unrestricted mobility are such prevalent aspirational tropes, especially in marketing the urban future, how can we account for the fact that these projects often produce the opposite experience for city-dwellers, especially the urban poor? This paper examines the experience of confinement through an ethnographic account of the Pettah Floating Market, a public space opened in Colombo under the post-conflict government of Mahinda Rajapakse. Through an analysis of vendors' complaints regarding the Market's operations, this study shows that confinement and free movement are both associated with distinct temporalities; global city-making is intimately linked to ideas of temporality and flow. Indian Ocean studies have frequently emphasized historical forms of mobility, exchange and circulation. Contemporary policy-makers often repeat the same tropes in official proclamations about the need to reinvigorate transnational connections, usually in the service of global capital. This paper offers a different perspective for understanding the lived realities of urban development and change in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region, considering confinement and stasis as central to contemporary Colombo life. Temporality can be productively understood as produced by different experiences of movement or stasis.
Paper short abstract:
Examining the emerging city of Cochin whose development has been driven by financial speculation, the paper explores the actors (developers, financiers and bureaucrats) and their 'hustlings,' interrogating how notions of investable futurity are constructed and endowed upon spaces
Paper long abstract:
Cochin, an emerging city in South India (on the Malabar Coast), has seen extraordinary urban development and growth in the last two decades, much of it driven by the high-end residential real estate sector, 60-70% of which stands unoccupied held by Non-Resident Indian (NRI) living abroad (mostly in the UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar) as "long-term investments." No longer is real estate development in this city just about building for use-value, but increasingly more so for exchange-value as forms of long-term investments and speculative financial gain. The paper examines this juxtaposition, focusing on how Cochin's 'residential flat' has come to be constructed as a viable investment to reap the rewards of the city's (and more broadly the state's) 'impending' future of urban growth and development. That imagining of the city's 'impending future,' I contend is something deeply rooted in constructed understandings of their urban present as being 'backwards,' headed towards a future currently embodied by cities like Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Singapore (cities to which many Keralites also emigrate to in search of securing their own economic mobility and future). Such constructions of temporality on space, I argue, inform what 'the modern' and 'the future' can look like in emerging cities such as Cochin, which then in turn materialize (though at times in compromised form) as capital is moved accordingly by people for its construction.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the temporalities that infuse a building project being constructed in Mombasa, Kenya. The project erases some histories while preserving others, and exposes the tensions around a Shia Muslim community's efforts to secure a place for themselves within the city's future.
Paper long abstract:
'Live in Confidence!' exclaims the marketing slogan for the Jaffery Complex, a vertiginous building project going up in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. Designed by and for Khoja Ithna-Asheris, Shia Muslims of Gujarati origin who count generations of residence in the city, mitigating urban insecurity is but one of the project's goals. This paper starts by positioning the Jaffery Complex within a global geography of edifices. Imagined as befitting Mombasa's significance within the history of the Khoja diaspora worldwide, the project attempts to ameliorate the local community's 'edifice complex' (Grant 2014) on a transnational scale. A series of tower blocks organised around a cricket pitch long at the centre of Khoja life on the Kenyan littoral, the project ardently preserves some histories while erasing others. Architectural features reveal the entanglement of market, religious and political economics that drive its construction, and expose the tension between outreach and retreat that mark Khoja efforts to secure a place for themselves within the city's future. The Complex offers greater self-sufficiency from behind its gates, while at the same time adopting 'pan-Islamic' designs intended to reduce urban religious divisions and reproduce Mombasa's alleged history of social harmony for generations to come.
Paper short abstract:
I explore urban temporalities through articulations of middle class housing in post-socialist Maputo, Mozambique. By exploring the ways in which actors try to secure their future, we discuss middle class contours under capitalist conditions and how this is shaped by the legacies of the past.
Paper long abstract:
Based on ethnographic data from Maputo, Mozambique, this presentation explores urban temporalities through articulations of new forms of middle class housing strategies on the 'inside' of a post-socialist political cosmology. Focusing on private housing strategies in Maputo, we identify modalities of middle classness that are being articulated within a socio-political system that is still infused by the aesthetics of socialism despite its collapse in the mid-1980s. Fearing the effects of downward mobility, members of the upper middle class who are close to the governing Frelimo party seeks to visibly embody a liberal ideology of 'autonomy', while simultaneously being dependent on state structures. Through an examination of the ways in which privileged social subjects attempt to secure their position in the face of an increasingly precarious future, the article outlines the contours of middle classness under contemporary capitalist conditions and how this is shaped by the legacies of the past.
Paper short abstract:
Post-conflict debates about the future and the city image manoeuvre between notions of "Abidjan will never be beautiful", "sustainable city" and "the new Ivorian" citizen. The paper provides empirical examples of how these debates have practically affected inhabitants of waterfronts.
Paper long abstract:
During the Ivorian crisis, the urban land area of Abidjan has grown ten per cent while its population has doubled and reached five million inhabitants. Habitation became much denser, unplanned urbanisation flourished and the city has moved closer to the Ebrié Lagoon and the Atlantic Coast. Promising economic indicators attract international investors and slowly also tourists again. The new political alliance with Morocco, governmental urbanisation projects and private real estate investments start moulding "the return" of the city. The municipality, architects and investors use waterfronts to rehabilitate a city image from the 1980s, when Abidjan still was "perles de lagune" though it is tattered by environmental pollution of the lagoon as a post-conflict consequence. Abidjan faces a housing crisis, which is accelerated by municipal policies to recover lost public waterfronts by evicting unplanned settlements, as well by legal inconsistencies and frauds on the land market. The paper analyses public debates of the government newspaper Fraternité Matin (2011-2017) and other media sources about current challenges and the future image of the city which manoeuvre between notions of "urban disorder", "Abidjan will never be beautiful", "sustainable city" and "the new Ivorian". It will also provide examples of how these policies and public discourses have practically affected inhabitants of waterfronts based on an ethnographic survey, observations and interviews with residents, real estate agencies and local authorities in Koumassi and Port Bouët.