Paper short abstract:

Through the ethnographic case of homeless migrants/refugees in the urban area of Termini Station in Rome (Italy), this paper aims to complexify the image of the margin, together with the anthropological concept of liminality, understood as a paradoxical space-time of risk and possibility.

Paper long abstract:

In the contemporary context, in relation to sharp logics of social and economic differentiation, the borders and the margins multiply and 'fractalize' (Tulumello-Bertoni 2019), reproducing themselves in pervasive, interstitial, less recognizable forms 'at the centre' of states and cities.

The form of the margin shatters to the point of being embodied by bodies themselves and by the practices implemented by certain subjects within the urban area.

This is particularly noticeable in Italy: stuck in a condition of 'in-betweenness', the homeless, the migrants in the centre of the cities, represent the limits through which the definitions of citizenship, city – and 'decoro' – acquire substance.

Through the ethnographic case of the homeless migrants in the area of Termini station in Rome, the aim is to expose the intersection of structural violences and perpetuating mechanisms of marginalization. Simultaneously, by virtue of the intrinsic paradoxicality that qualifies the image of the margin, outline creational processes of 'eccentric' subjectivities (de Lauretis 1999) - beginning from the assumption of the interstitial space being less defined and less captured by the dominant discourse that produces it (Brighenti-Mattiucci 2019).

For what concerns the migratory (/existential) path of many of the subjects encountered, that of Termini may be called an 'inner border zone of suspension'. In this sense, some socio-symbolic practices are interpretable as 'vital tactics' aimed at 'domesticating' a highly dangerous 'liminal space-time', projecting it in a shared horizon of sense to go back to 'occupying a position in the centre of the world' (Basaglia 1961).

Paper short abstract:

I propose the liminal as a vantage point through which residents of a London housing estate undergoing ‘regeneration through demolition’ refuse the displacement, dispossession and racial banishment that accompany it and analyse the limits of a discourse on homeownership and its attendant rights.

Paper long abstract:

The Aylesbury estate, a social housing complex in inner London, has been under regeneration since 1999 and under the threat of demolition since 2005. This “regeneration/demolition regime” has congealed into a semi-permanent condition operating at a peculiar pace where long periods of stasis are punctuated by sudden accelerations of activity. Thus the liminal time-space that residents inhabit is one of uncertain, ongoing suspension - what I call “living within demolition”. This is a temporal and material condition, as infrastructures and financial value are systematically ruined by planned disinvestment. It is also more than that: in this paper I will argue that residents living within demolition enact a politics of refusal (Audra Simpson 2014) through which they disavow the principles of regeneration/demolition, and the dispossession that accompanies it. Residents not only refuse to accept the regeneration/demolition as a fait accompli, they also analyse it as an act of classed and racialised banishment (Ananya Roy 2019) and thus locate it within historical trajectories of colonial and postcolonial violences. In particular here I focus on the collective response of racialised homeowners who are subject to compulsory purchase, and who come to question their status as citizens as they are expelled from the “nation of homeowners” that Thatcher’s government envisaged with the implementation of the 1980 Right to Buy policy. I thus propose the liminal as a vantage point through which residents analyse the limits of a discourse on homeownership and its attendant rights in light of racialised historical trajectories of inhabitation.

Paper short abstract:

Building on ongoing work, this paper explores how the logistical practice that constitutes evicting makes and remakes the displaceability of life through its own form of becoming liminal.

Paper long abstract:

This paper articulates how forms of urban governance make possible the displacement of urban life through the reproduction of their own margins. Looking at the ongoing work and forms of care of the logistical practices which underpin the work of 'evicting' (Baker 2021) and the policing of urban property, it explores the hypothesis that the practice of displacement exists within its own constant and ongoing self-produced margins in which to operate upon those it displaces. This aims to explain how agents of eviction and the displaceable share and appropriate durations and spaces, and how evicting institutions become necessary to the functioning of urban economies yet also stigmatised. This occurs through both a political theology of 'demonization' involving the production of choice and blame (Kotsko 2017), and forms of perpetual re-iteration, improvisation, and hybridization: an oscillation between the attempt to 'fix' urban space and the continual re-imagining of the boundaries of the legal, technical, and possible. Identifying 'logistics' as both a practice of delivery and a science of property-making (Moten and Harney 2021), I argue the logistical work of evicting makes and remakes the displaceability of life through its own 'demonic' form of liminality.

Baker, A. (2021). From eviction to evicting: Rethinking the technologies, lives and power sustaining displacement. Progress in Human Geography, 45(4), 796-813.

Kotsko, A. (2017). Neoliberalism's Demons. Theory & Event, 20(2), 493-509.

Moten, F. and Harney, S. (2021) All Incomplete. Minor Compositions.

Paper short abstract:

Cova da Moura is a neighbourhood built by its poor, migrant, and multi-ethnic residents, mostly of African origin or descent, on the outskirts of Lisbon, using mutual aid practices which resulted in a strong and active associative network that resists demolition, relocation and expulsion.

Paper long abstract:

Cova da Moura is an informal neighbourhood built and inhabited by a migrant and multi-ethnic population, most of African origin and decent, on the periphery of Lisbon. It's a place of symbolic and spatial borders. Cova da Moura is a mediatized space, and the object of hybrid discourses that stigmatize and rehabilitate it. It is regarded as an ethnic enclave and a ghetto. It is also a touristic place, where guided tours are conducted. Kola San Jon, an event held annually, has recently become cultural heritage as part of a strategy to legitimize Cova da Moura and its population. it is also a center for blackness. The neighbourhood was recently the subject of a state initiative for socio-spatial qualification, which was subsequently suspended. Even though national and city authorities value diversity, this neighbourhood remains at risk of demolition and its population at risk of expulsion and of social exclusion, suffering frequently from police violence. My research aimed to observe the political, social, economic, cultural, and symbolic interactions held between this neighbourhood (and its residents), and the various areas of the metropolitan area of Lisbon, seeking to discuss their different integration strategies in society as well as the marginalization traits as they are perceived from inside Cova da Moura as well as from outside. I did fieldwork, which allowed me to have access to the neighbourhood’s routine, doing participant observation in a local association and I also researched media content and conducted interviews.

Paper short abstract:

This paper address how ‘social mix’ is experienced among newcomers on a gentrifying urban frontier. As that frontier is not yet fully established, liminal spatio-temporal dimensions will be highlighted providing an opportunity to study tactics of place belonging and struggles over space.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of “compulsory social mix” is offered to describe the ambivalence gentrifiers experience towards their new locality when meeting vulnerable agents seen as representing marginality in the city as well as a barrier for its transformation. While most studies have focused on tensions based on ethnoclass disparities created in the gentrification of poor neighborhoods, less attention has been dedicated to how social mix is experienced among newcomers on a gentrifying urban frontier. As that frontier is not yet fully established, it carries liminal spatio-temporal dimensions and provides an opportunity to study tactics of place belonging and struggles over space between newcomers and vulnerable locals. This conceptualization is twofold as it captures (1) gentrifiers’ views of social mix as a social process forcing them to deal with contested urban spaces; and (2) their use of economic and symbolic power to claim ownership on the transformed locality. This study is based on anthropological fieldwork (2019-2021) in a gentrifying Tel Aviv frontier named Gan HaHashmal located between the higher-income neighborhoods of central Tel Aviv and the poorer neighborhoods to its south. Its findings reveal that while gentrifiers advocate diversity and express a humanist approach towards the homeless and drug addicts in the area, in practice, their daily interactions and discourse exclude these Others as part of the production of a “White”, wealthy neighborhood. While the conceptualization was developed based on a particular gentrifying urban frontier in Tel Aviv, it can be applied to interpret other contested urban spaces of social mix elsewhere.