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- Convenors:
-
Rivke Jaffe
(University of Amsterdam)
Anne-Christine Trémon (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)
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- Chair:
-
Martijn Koster
(Wageningen University)
- Discussant:
-
Brenda Chalfin
(University of Florida and Aarhus University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
How are decisions made around what goods should be public ? How are 'publics' constituted in urban contexts worldwide? This panel develops an anthropological approach to public goods that foregrounds the politics of value.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to connect insights from urban, moral and political anthropology to re-direct attention to public goods in urban contexts worldwide. In contrast to mainstream economic approaches to public goods that emphasize efficiency, non-excludability, and 'willingness-to-pay', an anthropological approach to public goods can reinvigorate the concept by foregrounding issues of value and valuation, the right to the city, and state-citizen relations. More fundamentally, an anthropological approach raises questions of how decisions are made around what goods should be public and of how 'publics' are constituted in the course of provisioning.
We invite papers that examine the production, distribution and consumption of public goods in cities across the globe. The erosion, in various degrees across the North/South divide, of state-led development models in favour of participatory governance and market-led provisioning has opened up new modes of governance and public goods production, accompanied by new forms of inequality. These new forms of governance also include digitised governance or "smart city" projects that may contribute to unequal access, and raise issues of privacy and data commodification.
In the context of the increasingly uneven or conditional provisioning of public goods, ethnographic approaches are well-suited to understanding how boundaries of inclusion and exclusion are drawn. We welcome papers that examine how struggles for public goods intersect or conflict with claims by states and other governance actors to act in the public interest. Such struggles include attempts at commoning to counter dispossession, decommodifying / publicizing activities normally deemed "private", and constructing alternative ethical projects.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the dynamics of urban land grabbing by political elites in Kenya, and the ways in which land as a public good is negotiated and claimed in the city of Eldoret in particular. I argue that struggles over land grabbing in Kenya have become emblematic of postcolonial urban politics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the dynamics of urban land grabbing by political elites in Kenya, and the ways in which land as a public good is negotiated and claimed in the city of Eldoret in particular. In Kenya, 'land grabbing' refers to the privatisation of public land through illegal or irregular allocation. Organised in complex networks involving various actors from the private and public sectors, land grabbing has been rampant in urban areas since the country gained independence. These practices, located both in the formal and informal realms, have led to the accumulation of wealth and land by Kenyan elites, and have become central in popular discourses on corruption. On a more practical level, space for public utilities in urban areas has become scarce, thus affecting urban governance and planning. Land grabbing is currently being addressed by institutions aiming at repossessing grabbed land, as well as by citizens using new forms of expression and mobilisation to claim their rights to public space and facilities. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the secondary city of Eldoret, located in Kenya's Rift Valley, the paper traces the historical trajectory of land grabbing in Kenya and looks at the discourses and strategies deployed by various -and often competing- actors. By shedding light on the ways in which processes of property making, state making and citizen making interact, I argue that struggles over land grabbing in Kenya have become emblematic of postcolonial urban politics, while also carrying promises of change and of a better future.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the trends that reproduce the longstanding dual city structure in Windhoek, Namibia, and the implications that such trends have for those living precariously in the informal settlements of the city.
Paper long abstract:
Namibia, like many other African counties is urbanizing rapidly. This has led to the sprawling of informal settlements that have been recognized as 'an emergency' to be dealt with through upgrading, urban land tenure reforms and targeted housing solutions. However, coupled with such reforms and their egalitarian justifications, there are trends that reproduce the dual city structure inherited from apartheid times and the rather extreme gap between the rich and the poor. Just as informal settlements are a symptom of the rapid growth of the city, so is the coming up of gated communities and more recently, of suburbs and 'lifestyle estates' further away from the city itself. The development of these spaces is driven by the financialization of land, but also by the desire of the elites to opt out of the unpleasant aspects of Namibian urban dynamics - the perceived disorder, nuisance and dangers associated with the poor. This weakens their sense of a shared society as well as their incentives to support solutions to the problems of the latter. The new real estate developments embody a powerful and widely shared bourgeois ideal of better life. However, these same developments might actually play a part in hindering improvements for many of the city's poorer residents. This ideal largely grounds rights in rate-paying and stands in contrast with the sentiment widely shared among informal residents that sees land, housing and basic services as rightfully deserved by all. The paper is based on fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2019.
Paper short abstract:
This paper theorizes that the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes followed by the mass mobilizations around pensions in France, in terms of demands for public services and resources from the state, represent the emergence of a new political bloc, reconfiguring class struggle in the era of neoliberalism.
Paper long abstract:
Based on my ongoing ethnographic research of urban mobilizations in comparative perspective, this paper analyses the struggles in France over the past few years in terms of perceptions of the responsibilities of the state and inequality. The Gilets Jaunes and more recently the massive mobilization around pensions, have coalesced around demands for public services. In the context of the growing gap between rich and poor, in November 2018, the Gilets Jaunes emerged with a focus on the degradations of public services, the privatization of health care and their own daily challenges more than with abstract inequality. As they continued their demonstrations every weekend, they were joined a year later by the unions, across the spectrum from radical to moderate, calling for nationwide strikes against state pension policies. These renewed mobilizations are claiming rights to state services such as health, education, retirement, care for the handicapped and problems of the frail elderly. Such movements are in contrast to experiences across the United States and other parts of Europe where the policies of austerity have been ongoing and mass mobilizations have so far been less successful. I would suggest that the reactivated class struggles in France represent a new political bloc emerging to fight against the destructive processes of neoliberalism and for the retention of a welfare state.
Paper short abstract:
By showing residents' and community activists' discursive and technical attempts to render service delivery in non-exclusive ways, I discuss infrastructural activism and actions as generative of a local energopolitical public that negotiates redistributive politics and justice in South Africa
Paper long abstract:
Since the corporatisation of basic services in Johannesburg during the early 2000's, several social movements formed to address exclusive (under)supply, unjust price systems and billing technologies, or the live threatening dangers stemming from aging electricity infrastructure especially in the marginalised parts of the city. Activists not only channelled disappointments of a postapartheid era, some became (in)famously known for their radical interventions, for example as self-proclaimed "emergency electricians" offering professional yet illegal connections for poor households being disconnected from the grid. They engaged in a discursive battle to decriminalise electricity theft, share and translate relevant knowledge, publicly teach technical skills, and experiment with techniques to manipulate, extend, re-work or "re-appropriate" the public infrastructure, for electricity to them is "a right, not a privilege". While I will show how their skills, practices and repertoires of action are embedded in a local knowledge production that relates to a certain socialisation of a distinct infrastructural public of a township, uniting ethics of repair, the experience of material deprivation and communitarian sense of care, I demonstrate that these residents not only constitute a local energopolitical public that negotiates the conditionality of essential state services, but also actively construct a socio-material base for a more solidary present, alternative to what they perceive as technocratic neglect and neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state. Thereby they purposely collide with material and political ordering claims of the government and enter into a conflict about legitimacy, reparation, justice, acknowledgement, and de/commodification of public goods in post-liberation times.
Paper short abstract:
This paper contrasts two distinct types of governing communal tomb land, participatory and top-down, in the newly urbanised villages in Xi'an and Fuzhou. It argues that the state's governing of tomb land as emerged public goods has double bind both in GDP growth and affective relations.
Paper long abstract:
The clearing of land occupied by tombs has become a major stake of state governance and a source of conflict in rapidly urbanising China in the past decades. These collectively owned plots of land functioned as commons, as the local inhabitants used them to worship their ancestors. In recent years tomb land has become part of officials' politics of value, and tombs have been relocated and remains have been cremated. In this paper we seek to understand how such re-evaluation is undertaken, what kind of governance is adopted, and how people negotiate with monetary as well as non-monetary values. Drawing upon ethnographic research in recently urbanised villages in Xi'an and Fuzhou, this paper contrasts two distinct types of governance, namely, participatory and top-down, involving municipal, military, civil affairs agents and urbanised native villagers. These diverging ways of turning tomb land into public goods will shed light on the contextual differences in political processes underlying public goods provision. The double bind faced by the state in handling its citizens affective relation to the dead and the imperatives of GDP growth provides a critical space to rethink the role of the local state in development.
Paper short abstract:
Narratives of neoliberal dispossession are well known in studies of the global South. But what of more efficacious attempts to contest decommoning of urban public goods? This paper takes a non-capitalocentric approach to the city to examine opposition to decommoning of socialist housing in Vietnam.
Paper long abstract:
Narratives of neoliberal dispossession, despite resistance from a rights-claiming public, are well known in critical urban studies of the global South. But what of more efficacious attempts to contest displacement and the decommoning of public goods that have accompanied the privatization of cities? This paper takes a non-capitalocentric approach to the city to examine opposition to the decommoning of socialist housing in urban Vietnam. The unplanned obsolescence of Vietnam's model socialist city, built with the technological assistance of East Germany, provided fodder for capitalist redevelopment and demolition of the celebrated "solidarity" buildings in a post-Cold War global order. This paper traces the struggles that ensued between the state, developers, and residents, who organized collectively to demand inclusion in the fraught project of urban "renewal." I show how denationalization of state property was a contested process that threatened to dismantle the urban commons. In so doing, it generated political subjectivities that ascribed historical, ecological, technical, and affective values to the crumbling housing blocks and their generous communal spaces. In refusing to separate the logic of the commons from that of urban growth, residents resisted the re-spatialization of inequality in the city, while disrupting the capitalist cycle of raze and rebuild.