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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:
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Brenda Chalfin
(University of Florida and Aarhus University)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 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 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Public transport is one of the urban public goods. Various calls have been made for it to be free across the world. What potential or limitations does public transport have with regard to its inclusive and social dimensions if it is a free public good?
Paper long abstract:
The paper discusses questions of justice and rights to the city using practices of fare-free public transport (FFPT) as an entry point. Fare is a principal factor that affects access to public transport, and fare control is a way to police internal spaces of public transport including the marginalisation of migrants. Attending to the publicness permits the exploration on how the different characteristics of public transport affect its publicness, not only in terms of physical and material aspects, but also as regards the practices and habits of public transport users. Arguably, by making public transport free, it becomes a truly accessible public good able to provide equal service to all urban residents despite their financial capacities. The paper draws from the research insights of HERA-funded project "Public transport as public space in European cities: Narrating, experiencing, contesting" to understand how the abolition of fares could affect the way in which different social groups experience and appropriate public transport as potential and actual public space. Tallinn—the capital city of Estonia—is the principal case here, having FFPT (although only for residents) at work since 2013. This case is brought together with sites such as Brussels with no general free public transport but with free tickets provided on different social basis — such as for the poor, the unemployed, and pensioners — but excluding others such as migrants. The paper draws from ethnographic and geographical research on these two cities as well as insights from other fieldwork sites the project engages with.
Paper short abstract:
This paper deals with the public good of participating in urban renewal. In Vienna, so called soft urban renewal has been established as a bundle of policies creating opportunities of participatory urban renewal. This paper explores how these policies predefine publics participating in them.
Paper long abstract:
Soft urban renewal is a source of pride in the official discourse of the municipality of Vienna, and brings international recognition such as through the UN Habitat Award. It is also a public service provided by a private company created to the sole end of working in the name of the city. But whom does it serve? The key to soft urban renewal is citizen participation, that is increasingly becoming seen as an integral part of sustainable development. This paper focuses on the municipal side of soft urban renewal: How are citizens reached for inclusion into the participatory policies? On which values do the multiple municipal authorities involved manage to agree? On which basis can the ideas of some citizens be considered in urban renewal and others not? Theoretically this paper engages with acts of citizenship as understood by Engin Isin in order to trace how the inclusion of some citizens and the exclusion of others comes to be. Empirically it is based on participant observation in the public service facilities "Gebietsbetreuung Stadterneuerung" as well as on interviews with various sets of actors holding official positions in the municipality who professionally engage with citizen participation as part of soft urban renewal.
Paper short abstract:
In analyzing a successful public library renovation that included a private cafe, I turn from the public/private dichotomy to scholarship on branding. I argue that the public sector can appropriate techniques developed by the for-profit, commercial sector -- not to erode but to enhance a commons.
Paper long abstract:
A public library in a small midwestern American city was recently renovated, controversially featuring a café run by a local chain. Some worried that a for-profit entity in the public space was anathema and made the library look like a commercial bookstore. But the renovation has greatly promoted the public mission of the library: it is full of patrons of a diverse mix of ages, sizes, race/ethnicity and socio-economic status, from graduate students and moms of preschool children to clients of the homeless shelter down the road. How is it that an upscale cafe within the library space did not produce the usual exclusionary effects of privatization?
The discussion around the privatization of public goods and services usually takes the entry of private business interests to be a sign of dispossession, to be countered by efforts to re-common and decommodify them. Here, I turn from an analysis focused on the public/private dichotomy to scholarship on branding to attend to another phenomenon: the ways the public sector can appropriate techniques developed by the for-profit, commercial sector not to erode but to enhance a commons. I argue this library has adapted commercial techniques that reduce the appearance of impersonal commodity-exchange relations, from simulating personalized interactions to designing spaces conducive to human comfort and conviviality, but do this without the restricting, silencing and exclusionary effects of commercial "brand regimentation." It is now a less impersonal space with new affordances for diverse forms of social interaction, discussion, contemplation, and community support.
Paper short abstract:
Portrayals of China's municipal governments as entrepreneurial actors ignore the role they play in public goods provisioning. Drawing on ethnographic work in Chengdu, this paper adopts a moral economy approach to understand how community leaders came to "publicize" two goods.
Paper long abstract:
Municipal leaders in neosocialist China are often characterized as entrepreneurial actors engaged primarily in paving the way for capital accumulation through real estate development. But this portrayal ignores the expanding role that local governments play in public goods provisioning—a role reflected in recent urban governance strategies focused on community-building and creating a "service-oriented" government. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in suburban Chengdu, this paper adopts a moral economy approach to understand how community leaders came to shoulder responsibility for partly "publicizing" two goods: residential parking and vegetable markets. Since urbanization, community leaders have relocated the open-air vegetable market three times, and, in a move echoing Mao-era subsidized food pricing, are working with the city to build an inexpensive market. By contrast, the parking issue has no socialist roots. When the area was urbanized in 2004, developers planned for less than one automobile per household; today most households have at least one car. These two "boundary goods"—goods that straddle the border between public and private provisioning—illustrate the web of entitlements and responsibilities that Thompson saw as the basis of the moral economy. Understanding community-level leaders as being embedded in moral frameworks established by government directives on the one hand, and middle-class residents' demands on the other, offers the potential to reinvigorate our theorization of the local state in China.
Paper short abstract:
After the introduction of a strict building code in 2007, there is a curious tendency to re-privatise the historical townscape of Kyoto. Who is more mindful of this public good, local government or the private neighbourhood initiatives tasked with discussing construction details with builders?
Paper long abstract:
The visual appearance of the urban built environment can be a key public good for pleasing residents, attracting visitors and thereby stimulating the provision of a whole range of private goods, from the apartment to the souvenir. The townscape is unevenly distributed, however, and how exactly the single buildings constitute it and what must be done to protect it is often hotly contested. Few cities have seen as much debate in this regard as Kyoto, the historical capital of Japan. While hesitant for a long time, the city government adopted the strictest building code of the country in 2007, with permissible heights greatly reduced and Kyoto design features mandatory now.
The new rules stand uncontested and have contributed their share to the current boom of particularly foreign tourism. Based on fieldwork in 2019/20, however, the paper will deal with a curious tendency to re-privatise the townscape. For one thing, the city government keeps praising the traditional town houses that define Kyoto style. The ones too large for conversion into shops, restaurants or guesthouses still get demolished, however, with Kyoto City reluctant to buy up such private real estate. For another, the development of more fine-grained rules for specific neighbourhoods has been suspended in favour of builders' consultations with neighbourhood-based initiatives, often formed around veteran activists. The paper looks at the contradictions arising from empowering these "townscape warriors/worriers" rather than the public bureaucrats and asks which of the two sides is more mindful of the public good.