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:
-
Jenny Lindblad
(KTH Royal Institute of Technology)
Nikhil Anand (University of Pennsylvania)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Roundtables
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This roundtable explores how work among urban experts unfolds through relations, negotiations and modifications with different temporalities. We attend specifically to how this work is entangled with paces engendered by bureaucratic documents and infrastructures.
Long Abstract:
Contemporary issues such as climate crisis, environmental injustice and capitalist extractions of finite resources call for critical engagements with futures. How do urban experts imagine and bring these futures into being? In recent years, these sociospatial mediations of temporal horizons have proven to be generative vista for anthropological analysis. In a review of the temporal turn in anthropology, Laura Bear urges us to "track the conflictual pacings of bureaucratic action" and explore "technologies of imagination" among expert knowledges (2016: 493). In this roundtable, we engage with Bear's provocation to consider how work among urban experts (planners, engineers, lawyers, for example) unfolds through relations, negotiations and modifications with various temporalities. Through planning, anticipation, and modelling, experts are continuously involved in portraying different futures as imaginable, unthinkable or unavoidable. The fashioning of futures draws on multiple time layers (pasts, presences, near and far futures) and different paces (cyclical, linear, hierarchical). While shaping mediations of time, urban experts are also confronted with asynchronous rhythms engendered through interrelated materialities of bureaucratic documents and infrastructures. Taking the intersection between urban expertise and materialities as a starting point, this roundtable addresses questions such as: how do urban experts arbitrate and address conflicting temporalities? How do struggles of legitimacy and authority play out in negotiations of time? Which techniques are mobilized for sensing and mediating diverse temporalities? How does attention to materialities help us conceptualise what temporalities do in the production of urban expertise, and what kinds of temporal processes challenge the work of urban experts?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
My research reveals the production of legitimacy through diverse temporalities in an unlikely site for sustainable design: a massive master-planned community in the American West spearheaded by a mining company and developed with equal parts attention to sustainable suburbanism and Mormon values.
Paper long abstract:
My current book project draws on five years of fieldwork in an unlikely site for sustainable design: a massive master-planned community in the American West spearheaded by one the largest mining conglomerates in the world and developed with equal parts attention to sustainable suburbanism and Mormon values. Now 15 years into an anticipated 30-year build out on remediated mining lands, the suburb in which the project is located is one of the fastest growing U.S. cities and has become an object lesson in sustainable development in politically conservative areas of the American West, including for its award-wining advanced stormwater retention system that integrates landscape architecture, infrastructural design, and earthquake preparedness. My research sheds light on the generative power of diverse temporalities amid this long-term build-out, as architects, mining officials, planning non-profits, builders, municipal workers, residents, marketers, master gardeners, and politicians negotiate aspirations for—and anxieties about—the material, social, aesthetic, and environmental future of the American suburb. My ethnographic observations and interviews provide rich material through which to theorize the production of expertise and legitimacy in contexts where environmental skepticism looms large and where sacred spaces and religious historical figures figure prominently in the material and discursive strategies of designers, planners, and politicians. Discussion topics drawn from mining company executives contemplating post-extraction land use; planning professionals proposing models for the future of a sprawling valley; marketers timing the build-out of high-density housing in suburban areas accustomed to the converse; and religious faithfuls noting the timeless sacredness of the land.
Paper short abstract:
Following shifting urban planning arrangements in France, Bordeaux prepared a land-use plan said to be 'contextualized'. Inquiring the implications of that claim among planners and politicians, I suggest that attention to 'contexts' expose diverse and conflicting temporalities in urban expertise.
Paper long abstract:
Urban planning in France is undergoing a shift. It is a shift in scale from plan-making in smaller municipalities towards larger metropoles, and a shift towards more flexibility to ensure that development plans are adjustable to unpredictable near-futures. When the city of Bordeaux revised its land-use plan towards the background of this shift, they sought to prepare a 'contextualized' plan. In this paper, I engage with the implications of this claim based on fieldwork among planners, bureaucrats, local politicians and planning documents in Bordeaux. In discussions among planning practitioners and theorists, context is a notion often sympathetically associated with bottom-up approaches and sensitivity to local communities. Rather than resonating with such assumptions, I show how the idea of a contextualized plan in Bordeaux was charged with manipulations of bureaucratic, legal and political temporalities in struggles over authority and democratic legitimacy. Local politicians seeing their decision power reduced following the shift of scales made use of the increased flexibility to influence in other stages of planning procedures, particularly reviewing of building permits. The call for a 'contextualized' plan was riddled with adverse relations between planners' further-looking perspectives and local politicians' strive for assuring authority over planning decisions in an unfolding presence, suggesting an importance to attend to diverse and conflicting temporalities embedded in calls for 'context'.
Paper short abstract:
How is time conceptualized in energy modelling exercises? What kinds of temporality are adopted, which temporalities are explicit, how are futures conceptualized, and how does the model or the modellers address modes of time?
Paper long abstract:
All urban experts work with some kind of model - whether it is a model of the world, a philosophical frame, or an equation that helps to calculate needs or problems. There are many forms of expertise, and many approaches to modelling, and models applied to urban settings may not be limited to urban contexts. In the current world of Climate Emergency declarations, increasing pressures for an Energy Transition, and ongoing technological optimism, the role of energy modellers is quietly becoming ever more significant. Researchers are being asked to develop whole-system models, that represent all kinds of energy generation, use, distribution, and interaction. Using examples from one integrated-energy-systems research centre, this contribution asks how time is conceptualized in energy modelling exercises. What kinds of temporality are adopted, which temporalities are explicit, how are futures conceptualized, and how does the model or the modellers address modes of time?
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores why urban planners in Mumbai have not designed urban climate adaptation projects, despite the dangers climate change poses to the city. To answer this question, I draw attention to the differentiated temporalities with which development is imagined and performed in the city.
Paper long abstract:
Over the last few years, Mumbai has regularly appeared on various (what I call) "Endangered Cities Lists"- lists of cities whose residents are most at risk from the intensified rains, cyclones and rising sea levels caused by anthropogenic climate change. Yet, while the city's various planning offices are full of capital-intensive infrastructure projects (metros, airports, highways, parks), climate adaptation or mitigation projects are noticeably absent. If planners in Mumbai do not question climate science, why is this the case? Why are urban planning departments in Mumbai, that are otherwise attuned to the future needs and demands of the city, evading addressing the potentially catastrophic impacts climate change may have on the city's present and future? Based on project documents, field interviews and a review of planning education in India, I argue that the silences around climate adaptation projects are produced by the historic and differentiated temporalities with which urban development is imagined, planned and performed in the city.
Paper short abstract:
In Taksim 360, Istanbul's first and imminently ongoing urban transformation project, delays are the crucial means through which power works among construction experts and politicians. I argue that delays are the modus operandi of urban expertise rather than signs of its failures.
Paper long abstract:
Taksim 360, located in the Tarlabaşı neighborhood of Istanbul, is one of the first state-led urban transformation projects in Turkey. Originally scheduled to be finished in 2014, the project is still very much under construction. Concordant with broader discussions on urban transformation, various scholars have studied Tarlabaşı's urban transformation through spatial analytical approaches centered on marginalization, accumulation by dispossession, and displacement. Yet urban transformation projects and urban expertise do not necessarily follow a linear trajectory from inception to completion.
I examine the relationships between construction companies, subcontractors, and political involved in Taksim 360 through ethnographic fieldwork and media analysis over time, with a critical emphasis on temporality. I argue that urban transformation in fact works through manipulations of time, which necessitates a temporal analytical lens that does not take teleologies of buildings projects for granted. It is specifically through delays that economic and political power is exerted, navigated, and negotiated within Taksim 360 among experts using legal contracts, work stoppages and stand-offs; conjuring of continued investment; and improvisations with labor and political capital. And so, extended temporalities of delays emerge as modus operandi of urban transformation rather than measures of its failures or successes, calling for an increased attention to temporality to understand how power works among urban experts.