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:
-
Rebekah Plueckhahn
(University of Melbourne)
Elisa Lanari (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)
Annemiek Prins (University of Aberdeen)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Friday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel aims at discussing how anthropology and the city may engage in a relation of inventive companionship in shared practices of urban speculation about peripheral forms of urbanism and modes of anthropological inquiry. The panel was created by Adolfo Estalella and Francisco Martinez.
Long Abstract:
How can anthropology relate to the city? As a site for investigation, an object of research or, perhaps as a source of mutual apprenticeships? We aim at discussing how anthropology and the city may engage in a relation of inventive companionship in shared practices of speculation and knowledge production.
There is an unmet need for knowledge about forms of city-making that take place beyond sanctioned forms and established institutions. A great variety of concepts have been recently coined to rethink contemporary ways of urbanism: from DIY urbanism to the makeshift city and composting. Located at the margins of the city and in the periphery of institutional knowledge, these subaltern interventions often speculate with other forms of collective living,
In this panel, we reconsider the speculative condition of these peripheral knowledges. By that we refer to a reflexive exercise that involves future-making against the grain (Savransky, Wilkie & Rosengarten 2017), exploring alternatives modes of urbanity whose generative condition is characterised by specific ways of thinking about problems (Simone 2010). At the same time that they bring to the fore relevant questions for thinking about the city in more fruitful ways, they open up a whole series of methodological and theoretical possibilities for anthropology.
We welcome papers that deal with urban speculations in the twofold dimension we refer here: ways of speculating about alternative urban forms and modes of anthropological inquiry. In so doing we are interested in revealing the productive -ontological and epistemological- condition of the periphery.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 24 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that a lateral engagement with city planning constitutes a peripheral investigation in situating and slowing down urban research. It provides a multi-sited ethnography with an infra-reflexive move to inquire the socio-technical modes of planning as political urgency.
Paper long abstract:
This paper critically engages recent debates in urban research that claim to generate 'urban theory without an outside'. It argues that theoretical debates of rapid global urbanism are human-centred extensions of the 'ideological edifice' dominating urban studies, and therefore, calls for more lateral conceptualisations to study cities without 'the urban'. This paper provides a multi-sited ethnography in the municipalities of Bordeaux and Lisbon. It argues that a perspective on city planning as an ecology of practices contributes to challenge current urban theory-making in three ways: First, while many studies in urban theory follow a reductive judgement of particular socio-spatial subjects/settings, this analysis questions the very reduction and prescription of time-space and its implicit modes of anticipation required to synthesise the city. Second, it attends to coordination, taking account of the explicit passage-points of democratic values, and the provisional gesture by urban experts in navigating absolute and relative urban spaces of knowledge-production. Third, it shows that city planning acts upon an infrastructural 'in-versioning' of cities that are enacted as differentiated materialisations of public goods. Finally, the paper assesses that a lateral engagement constitutes an infra-reflexive move arguing in favour of situating urban research not only in terms of 'idiotic' analysis but through a peripheral investigation of the socio-technical modes of planning as political urgency.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes how "insurgent" forms of city-making can emerge at the heart of wealthy suburban peripheries. By comparing examples from the U.S. and Italy, I reflect on how abandoned spaces and infrastructures become imbricated in the making of alternative urban and anthropological futures.
Paper long abstract:
Urban anthropologists have pointed to auto-constructed peripheries and informal urban settlements as sites where dispossessed urban dwellers craft new, often provisional citizenship claims. In this paper, I shift the focus of these analyses to wealthy suburban enclaves, speculating on the "insurgent" forms of city-making (Holston 2009) that emerge in and through their spaces. My examples are drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two different peripheries: a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia (USA), and a small postindustrial town in Italy's northeastern Veneto region. I begin by provocatively stressing the similarities between these two places—discussing how overdevelopment and a booming regional economy have made them into emblems of middle class affluence. Historically dominated by right-wing politics, these communities have responded to the arrival of migrants and poor minorities through the progressive securitization of public spaces and neighborhoods (Gledhill 2018). And yet alternative forms of city-making have begun to emerge through the cracks open in these exclusionary projects. In Atlanta, Latinx immigrants have been repurposing the leftover spaces of suburban sprawl—gas stations, abandoned parking lots, incomplete sidewalks—through the rhythms of their neighborly care, walking practices, and informal business transactions (Lefebvre 2004). In Veneto's urban outskirts, activists and migrants are reclaiming public infrastructures and dismissed postindustrial sites through practices of commoning and urban farming (Casas-Cortés et al. 2014). I conclude by suggesting how anthropologists could engage with abandoned spaces and infrastructures to generate new forms of knowledge in and about the city and its "insurgent" peripheries.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses fog capture in the urban periphery in Lima. I frame these alternative off-the-grid water provision systems as experimental devices for imagining the urban political ecology differently, and I draw from devices to frame anthropological inquiry itself in terms of capture.
Paper long abstract:
Social theorists have long turned to the urban periphery in Lima to theorise auto-construction and self-help. While vulnerable to tropes of resilience and self-empowerment, such inquiries have nonetheless helped crafting the periphery into an epistemic object and location from where to theorise modernity's contradictions. In a somewhat different vein, in this paper I approach the periphery as in and of itself ontologically and epistemologically productive: a site from where the city continuously and speculatively theorises itself. I do so with recourse to my fieldwork on fog capture in Lima. Often a disappointing humanitarian technology or off-the-grid alternative to State induced large-scale infrastructural provisioning, fog traps have nonetheless served as experimental devices that elicit a series of relations to residents in the urban periphery. While setting out to trap and condense water droplets suspended in the air, fog traps relate fog, airborne particles, and the city, on the one hand, and the atmospherical, vegetation, and the underground, on the other hand. As such, fog catchers are devices for imagining the urban political ecology differently. I draw on these relations, rendered visible through experimental activities with fog catchers, to ask what ethnographic description itself, when framed in terms of capture, may body forth. By following Corsín Jiménez's (2018) framing of traps as heuristics for description, I discuss what anthropological inquiry can take with it from how the city enacts itself through relations of capture to fog.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the rural-urban comings and goings that are facilitated by 'rickshaw garages' in Dhaka. The inherently transitory space of the rickshaw garage is used as a starting point for analyzing the dialectical tension between access and exclusion that characterizes urban peripheries.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores what the 'urban' looks like from the outsides and outskirts of the city by focusing on the mobilities and migratory trajectories of cycle-rickshaw drivers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The everyday movements and rural-urban migrations of rickshaw drivers are to a large extent facilitated by the 'rickshaw garage'. This inherently transitory space is my point of departure for analyzing the wider dialectics of access and exclusion that characterize urban peripheries. Rickshaw garages are makeshift storage- and sleeping spaces that essentially operate as a gateway to the informal urban economy. The fact that rickshaw drivers can rent their vehicle on a per diem basis, however, makes that the garage functions as a space of both entrance and exit. It enables short-term ventures into the city, as well as frequent rural returns. I argue that the rickshaw garage not only highlights the opacity of the periphery - that is, the inability to identify just what is "coming and going" (Simone 2010:54) - but also how peripherality transcends territorial location. Rickshaw garages are frequently relocated and 'move with' the periphery as the city extends outward and more informal uses of space are pushed towards the fringes. I argue that the opacity and unfixity of such peripheral spaces helps demonstrate how social life is caught up in the tension between 'implosion' and 'explosion' that lies at the heart of processes of urbanization (Lefebvre 2003) and demands a form of urban scholarship that does not confine itself to the boundaries of the city.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines 'the between' from the point of view of the periphery, drawing on ethnography conducted in the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in conjunction with a uniquely generative feature of the Mongolian language to reformulate questions of opposition, continuity, and potentiality.
Paper long abstract:
Based on long-term fieldwork on the urban periphery or "ger districts" of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of a country wedged between two global powers, China and Russia, and two continents, Asia and Europe, this paper proposes a multi-faceted and speculative engagement with the concept of the between. To do so, it draws on the ger district as a place not only located physically between the countryside and the city, but a conceptual space defined against these two more-readily-established sites of meaning. Doing so requires a new theoretical vocabulary to account for this unique semi-legal, peri-urban zone in which formerly nomadic gers sit stationary while dirt paths are inscribed through the movements of people, cars and cows. Peripheries, such as the Ulaanbaatar ger district, are conceptually generative because they refer to both an edge and sit in the middle; being neither one thing nor another they recall Derrida's différance, a meaning deferred and experienced in opposition. However, rather than imposing a pre-existing concept on the complexities of this periphery, this paper instead builds an experimental theoretical lens through which to reflect on life in the ger district via an everyday feature of the Mongolian language "horshoo üg" (paired words). The momentary silence between paired terms that come together in opposition or complementarity resonates with the ger district -an area that is neither entirely urban nor rural- as both point to the potentialities of the between, potentialities that are larger than those that may be contained by a single (or central) point.
Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates the paradoxical survival of urban indigenous markets in the context of development strategies that privilege multinational retailers and rebrand Mexican cities as modern and globally competitive. It examines the surprising resilience of these markets as subaltern urbanism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper investigates the paradoxical survival of urban indigenous markets in the context of state-sponsored development strategies that privilege multinational retailers and work to rebrand Mexican cities as modern and globally competitive. I examine how indigenous markets have survived the supermarketization (and, more precisely, Walmartization) of food retail that has taken hold of Mexico. Better known by their Nahuatl name tianguis, open-air indigenous markets held in streets and public plazas predate the first conquistadors and remain common across Mesoamerica today. My examination of tianguis in native language texts, colonial narratives, popular art, and mid-20th century newspapers demonstrates that while they once constituted the unquestioned, central source of urban food provisioning in Mexico, the state and local elites began to depict them as antithetical to the modern city in the 1970s. Yet, while such campaigns, together with a host of subsequent neoliberal government policies, have ushered in a new era of supermarket dominance across the global South, tianguis have shown surprising resilience. Drawing on ethnographic research in Oaxaca, including auto-driven photo elicitation, spatial analysis and archival research, I argue that tianguis endure because they are rooted in attachment to indigenous foodways and vernacular perceptions of public space, the latter reinforced by fierce vendor activism. Today they constitute a key form of subaltern city-making in Mexico - carving out territory for groups marginalized by formal planners. Broadly, the paper demonstrates the multiple ways that anthropology may contribute to the uncovering of such urbanisms 'from below' and 'at the margins'.
Paper short abstract:
Discussant
Paper long abstract:
Discussant