Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the temporal and spatial dimensions of neighbourhood politics that are being crafted in a post-industrial and peripheral neighbourhood of Barcelona which is undergoing deep urban reconstruction.

Paper long abstract:

In a peripheral, post-industrial neighbourhood of Barcelona an ambitious plan of urban transformation is taking place by re-zoning an industrial zone into a commercial-residential one. It includes the construction of more than 10,000 flats, new roads, parks, schools and medical centres. During a 12-month fieldwork in 2022, I observed the work of activists and community groups in defending perceived common interests in the transformation process and in asserting neighbourhood identity and belonging. I consider two sets of social practices: first, the spatial ones, that is political mobilisation and demand-making constructed upon and for the neighbourhood; second, the temporal ones, that is community “memory work” through which the neighbourhood’s industrial past and the struggles for urban inclusion and democratic freedoms against the Franco regime are mobilised as tools to negotiate aspects of the transformation project.

During more than a decade of protracted economic and social crisis in the country, the realm of the neighbourhood has re-emerged as a site of political participation and sociality. In this context, a kind of neighbourhood politics appears that is informed both by the spatial - the material and discursive production of the neighbourhood - and the temporal – the conjuring together of fragmented memories of the past and desires for a more just urbanism. I contend that this kind of crafted neighbourhood politics enters in a tense but interesting dialogue with broader ‘national’ narratives on the country’s turbulent history and the broken promise of a democratic rebirth in the aftermath of the crisis.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how affective sensations related to future density are politicized and circulated in Zurich. Departing from research done on the city's land reserves, I argue that imaginaries of densification as crampedness consolidate what are considered wanted and unwanted urban bodies.

Paper long abstract:

Predictions of population growth or decline have become ubiquitous techniques of future-making in cities worldwide. In Zurich, Switzerland’s largest and wealthiest city, the municipality has been designing scenarios of growth ever since the beginning of its current wave of urban prosperity in the early 2000s. In 2018, the city released the 166-page master plan "Zürich 2040", based on a vision of 25% population increase by 2040, and planning the city’s transformation to accommodate it. Such future predictions, vague in their disembodiedness and yet seemingly imperturbable, have considerable impact on the affective world of local communities, and are further articulated as urban promises or threats in political initiatives of varying alignments. In this paper, I investigate how bodily sensations related to future density are politicized in Zurich through the circulation of affects such as crampedness and density stress. Departing from articulations of density as promise or threat, I argue that the future imaginaries thereby created and contested consolidate what are considered wanted and unwanted urban bodies. To illustrate this, I will rely on ethnographic data from my long-term fieldwork on Zurich’s "Brachen": vacant lots repurposed as urban commons by local groups, yet turned into strategic land reserves devoted to the future densification envisioned by the municipality. Departing from utopian visions of shrinkage as an urban phenomenon in Zurich, I show how fear of density lodges itself into the future imaginaries of seemingly ideologically opposed actors, such as activists and referendum campaigners on the commons and the right-wing Swiss People’s Party (SVP).

Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to address the processes of negotiation of public space by Aymara traders with official institutions and how they reconfigure and project the city of El Alto, based on cosmological logics and frameworks that guide their visions of well-being in urban life.

Paper long abstract:

Since its foundation in 1985, El Alto (Altu Pata in Aymara) has become Bolivia's second largest city and one of the economic centres in the Andes. It stands out for its mainly Aymara population, which makes it the most important emerging Indigenous city in the region, and for its (informal) commercial sector, which has turned it into a city where traditional and transnational economic practices coexist.

Despite having been projected as an industrial city, over time it has been transformed into a market city (Khatu Marka), where Aymara traders' associations, under community and trade union logics of organisation, articulate complex processes of negotiation with local governments and the state, in the constitution of commercial spaces and urban planning. This negotiation - sometimes conflictive - is accompanied by a gradual empowerment of these associations and the emergence of an Indigenous bourgeoisie that is increasingly acquiring greater social, economic and political prominence.

Based on ethnographic and historical work, this paper proposes to delve into the processes of negotiation of public space by Aymara traders and how they reconfigure and project the future of the city of El Alto. It proposes to approach the negotiation processes from an understanding of their own logics and cosmological frameworks that guide their aspirations and visions of well-being in urban life and how these - on occasions - contrast with the official contemporary urban planning projects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the impact of urban regeneration on urban communities. It brings together three ethnographies set across London and Belfast, where residents of urban housing have challenged short-term future visions of economy-led redevelopment of urban environments.

Paper long abstract:

In cities around the world, large-scale, economy-led processes of renewal and redevelopment tend to go hand-in hand with the demolition of perfectly viable buildings (and other social infrastructures). From the rubble, sanitised and seductive future visions of social and urban change, materialised in architectural renderings, marketing materials and community consultations, tend to emerge. In this paper, we will challenge whether this so-called “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1942; Harvey 1989) tied to the devaluation of pre-existing structures, landscapes and communities is inevitably linked with a city’s prosperous future. This paper interrogates how short-sighted future imaginaries and relentless past and planned cycles of demolition and eviction have impacted on the health and wellbeing of local people; how do they deal with repeated broken promises over time? What practices and narratives of care emerge when people step in to care for each other, for their communities but also for their everyday material surroundings and ecological environments, when broader, conventional structures fail? The paper brings together two ethnographies set in London and one in Belfast that sketch out the varying arcs of elusive promises made by developers to urban residents. It also examines how residents respond through a range of material practices - from gardening and grieving to setting up bonfires - as ways of puncturing glossy architectural renders of the future where they find it difficult to locate themselves.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation delves into experts' perceptions of urban settings as (un)secure for children, exploring their visions of children's future ties with these spaces and the potential for transformation through collaborative acts of response-ability, fostering care for mutual co-existence

Paper long abstract:

How is our co-existence with children imagined and incorporated into adults' and experts' imaginations about current and future cities? City planning in developing countries should be more noticed, as cities sprawl as a result of multiple interacting resistances rather than as the result of mutual acts of response-ability. While participative approaches have become vital in city planning, much still needs to be added to understanding how urban spaces are produced and inhabited by children and to what extent our world(s) collide or include their world(s). Amidst these tensions, care emerges as a critical concept to foster a gathering purpose to produce more complex and heterogeneous realities, reflecting upon urban spaces differently, incentivizing and encompassing (non)human diversity and interdependence. This proposal presents the result of ongoing research in Chile about the production and maintenance of urban spaces concerning their (un)caring potential regarding children's well-being. Wondering how care is enacted, experienced, sustained, and neglected as a relational outcome of socio-material entanglements between children and other human and non-human actors in urban spaces, we present the views of different experts linked to the design and the construction of Chilean cities. Following an STS approach, we explore how experts reflect upon these urban spaces, their caring potential, and the extent to which children are part of their present and imagined scenarios while wondering what portraits of children are produced in the city and their potential unfolding for the future.

Paper short abstract:

Climate catastrophe is upon us, yet the take up of basic strategies to address it are elusive in KwaDukuza. In contrast, advanced green technologies to disentangle from state services are commonplace. This paper explores public political perception as a driving forces behind future urban imaginaries

Paper long abstract:

Climate change looms large, particularly in coastal African cities. Contrary to the imagery of an impending apocalyptic future, the reality is an ongoing, insidious, and chronic disaster currently unfolding. While seemingly straightforward strategies to combat this crisis, such as waste separation and eco-mobility, have long been embraced in urban sustainability ideals globally, their implementation remains elusive within the KwaDukuza and eThekwini regions of South Africa. Motivation for such practices are scarce. In stark contrast, more advanced green technological solutions, including solar panelling and rainwater harvesting have become commonplace. Across a diverse range of economic geographies water tanks are integrated into irrigation systems, meticulously filtered, and utilised for various household activities. These transitions away from reliance on public water supply systems are not merely pragmatic choices but also emblematic of a political response to future visions marred by corruption, economic instability, and civil unrest, with climate and environmental concerns relegated to the background, or simply unimagined. This paper explores dynamics of perceived political failures and party politics as driving forces behind carving out sustainable future imaginaries within the KwaDukuza and eThekwini municipalities. Specifically, the paper explores narratives around the shift away from dependence on public water supply, a shift happening at the crossroads of local politics, changing weather patterns and the tangible constraints of aging public infrastructures. In doing so, the paper advocates for a nuanced reframing of adaptation practices to encompass their full complexity within politically charged and financially strained environments.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the the expansion of smart technologies relates to social disempowerment and urban transformation in the New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) market in China. I show how the promise of smart futures fosters the technological control over society by NEV producers and city authorities.

Paper long abstract:

What do New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) tell us about the future of urban mobility and property regimes in a rapidly changing Chinese megalopolis? Convenience (bianli) was a recurring trope used by producers, sellers, and consumers of NEVs during my fieldwork in Shenzhen within the Worlds of Lithium project. They usually referred to different “smart" devices and functions that enhanced the user experience of the vehicle. For producers and city authorities, they were also important sources of data for future modifications or policies. In hindsight, I realised that many “smart” technologies were redefining the way people experience urban mobility for the sake of convenience. In this paper, I build on Huberman’s (2021) notion of ‘ideology of convenience’ to explore the implications of smart technologies in the electromobility market in Shenzhen, China. I analyse what kinds of smart technologies are implemented in NEVs, how notions of convenience are deployed by producers and consumers, and to what extent are these technologies redefining traditional consumer property relations and the urban experience. I argue that the promise of smart futures fosters the technological control over society by NEV producers and city authorities, which is omitted by narratives of convenience. By looking at the urban transformations connected to the expansion of electromobility in one of China’s model socialist cities, I attempt a more systemic critique of a kind of techno-optimism that is deeply enmeshed in China’s project of a sustainable socialist modernity, which is guiding the transformation of its urban landscape.

Paper short abstract:

In Istanbul, urbanites rely on müteahhits (contractors)to rebuild before earthquakes. Hindered by insecure housing, they seek contractors who can "tweak" rules.I explore small-scale redevelopment projects of müteahhits to theorize intertwining of urban aspirations with the looming threat of disaster

Paper long abstract:

In Istanbul, most urbanites wait for the intervention of müteahhits (smaller contractors/property developers) to rebuild their apartments before earthquakes strike. Constrained by insecure housing, absent state support, and legally ambiguous ownership, in contrast to Istanbul’s upper classes residing in newer and secure apartments, the urban majority perpetually seeks smaller contractors capable of “tweaking” rules, plans, and regulations to rebuild their future homes, thereby shaping the trajectory of urban futures. Müteahhits, often overseeing ten to fifty workers and operating in small plots of four to five hundred square meters, function as informal problem-solvers, navigating the intricate web of residents, officials, traders, subcontractors, and other urban actors. This paper scrutinizes "tweaking" as a generative social and political practice in small-scale urban redevelopment, focusing on how contractors broker relations through adjustments in politics, informality, and moral conduct. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork conducted from October 2022 to November 2023 in the earthquake-prone Avcılar district of Istanbul, within the offices and construction sites of müteahhits, I analyze how piece-meal, plot-by-plot, small urban redevelopment projects are imagined and enacted through müteahhit’s finer-grained intermediary work of preparing contracts, abating political tensions, and mobilizing informal local networks to get projects done. Drawing on the literature on urban intermediaries, temporality, and moral economy, the paper seeks to contribute to debates on how people value urban change amidst intertwined futures, oscillating between aspirations for prosperity and the haunting specter of imminent disaster.

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how urban histories and futures are transformed by industrial development. Drawing on fieldwork in two northern Nordic industrial towns, the paper examines how "green transition" projects are making/unmaking urban residents' relations to past, present, and future city space.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how urban histories and futures are transformed by large-scale industrial development.

Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted in 2022 and 2023 with urban planners and residents in Mo i Rana, Norway, and Kiruna, Sweden, the paper examines how "green transition" projects in both sites are making and unmaking local urban historical pasts and anticipated futures.

Kiruna and Mo were both established in the early 20th century to support resource extraction, with companies building housing, schools, and other services to attract and retain industrial workers. Urban planning and architecture thus played an important role in materializing ideal industrial social and spatial orders in Kiruna and Mo, both initially developed as single-industry towns that until recently, faced uncertain futures and deindustrial decline. However, in 2021 Mo i Rana was chosen as the site of the Freyr lithium-ion factory – the largest in the Nordics – with national and regional ambitions to re-make Mo i Rana Norway’s “green industrial capital” . In January 2023, LKAB announced it had discovered one of Europe’s largest deposits of rare earth minerals in Kiruna, and that mining these deposits would be central both to the city's and to Sweden's sustainable futures.

Accordingly, this paper asks: What utopian visions for space and society underlie these “green” industrial projects? How are industrial cycles associated with utopian and dystopian development in Mo and Kiruna understood by local people? What are the social and political implications of making/unmaking urban space to materialize ideal industrial futures?

Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the contested futures of the Champ des Possibles, a rewilded space in Montreal which bears the toxic traces of its industrial past. If collaboration always implies contamination (Tsing 2010), the Champ raises questions: who speaks for a city? For wilderness? For the future?

Paper long abstract:

The Champ des Possibles is a unique urban space: a former railway depot tucked between highrises in Montréal's Mile End neighborhood, the space was abandoned in 2000 and quickly blossomed into an unruly, luscious, and contaminated ecosystem of its own. When that ecosystem was threatened by imminent development a decade later, a group of citizens organized themselves to defend the space. Since then the Champ has served as an uncanny oasis in the midst of the city, offering a vivid and messy experience of wilderness far different than the manicured parks which proliferate through the rest of the city. The organization which emerged from the citizens' movement, Les Amis du Champ des Possibles, continues to steward the site. Yet the future of the Champ is a contested one: its very soil is contaminated by toxins which manifest the trace of its industrial history, and different groups, from the City of Montreal to Les Amis to collaborating ecologists, hold contrasting ideas about what the process of "decontamination" should look like. Meanwhile the Champ has been periodically inhabited by unhoused citizens, leading to conflicts with the City and raising questions of who, exactly, the space belongs to. While the Champ may appear to embody a utopian urban future, it also shows the messiness of this process, with collaboration always intertwined with contamination (Tsing 2010). Who speaks for a city? For wilderness? Whose future is this?

Based on fieldwork during the production of an ethnographic fillm ("An Urban Wild", screened at FIFEQ 2023).

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how the notion of ‘heritage’ is used by different actors claiming the space of Montreal's Lachine Canal. While heritage is being produced by government and business sectors to increase the commercial value of the area, it is also used by activists to reclaim patrimonial sites.

Paper long abstract:

In Montreal, the reopening of the Lachine Canal into a place of recreation by Parks Canada was central to the condo boom of the mid-2000s, as industries, warehouses and silos were repurposed into business incubators and luxurious lofts (High, 2022). During this process of transformation, the notion of ‘heritage’ has been used by different actors claiming the space to contest the meanings of its past. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst community activists, archeologists, condo dwellers, business owners and Parcs Canada officials, I will demonstrate how the narrative, symbols and meanings of heritage differ while they have developed around a similar ‘language of contention’ (Roseberry, 1994). On the one hand, heritage is being produced by government and business sectors in order to increase the commercial value of the area. On the other, local activists, like the collective À nous la malting (mobilising since 2013 to save Quebec's last remaining decommissioned malthouse), resist the hegemonic gentrification narrative around heritage which commodifies the past. Instead, they use the concept to (re)claim local patrimonial sites like that of the Canada Malting Co. which they argue should be dedicated to community use. Taking a critical urban theory approach and concerned with the effects of gentrification on marginalised communities’ place-attachment (Harmon & Putney, 2003; Turan, 2018), I will show how the urban landscape acts as a powerful channel of communication between those who are competing over what the future will look like, and therefore what the past ought to mean.

Paper short abstract:

The paper will present snapshots of the ethnography of Corvetto, focusing on the relation between processes of beautification and monstrification.I will show strategies to erase the disturbing aesthetics of the present examining the politics of wanted/unwanted in producing the district of the future

Paper long abstract:

With the term hauntology a long sociological and philosophical tradition had analyzed the spectral presence of a past that haunts the present, in today's particular temporal, historical, and ontological disjuncture that challange the possibility of thinking about the future - what Mark Fisher called the “nostalgia for lost futures” (2014).

My presentation would show a specific fragment of an ethnography of beautification processes and unwanted policies in a Milan’s southern periphery, the neighborhood of Corvetto. Highly stigmatized and criminalized, in the last 5-6 years the district has changed significantly. In fact, a new image, linked to the next Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, is being proposed as an explicit destigmatization strategy to present Corvetto as a “new creative neighborhood”.

If we still find ghosts and monsters of its past, in the official narrative of this neighborhood there is anything but discourses on its charming and wonderful future. Corvetto is now told as “the future in Milan”, well embodied by the landscape of cranes that surrounds this urban area, but today its present disturbs.

If beautification acts erasing the disturbing visuality of the neighborhood, my argument is that the specific imagination conveyed by the normative ‘aesthetics of the future’ operates through an act of futuricide, or rather a slow erasure of possible futures (Fisher 2014). The intervention will look at the consequences and the materiality of the proposal of a single, hegemonic future based on a dominant urban imaginary that allows no alternatives for those who lives in this urban space.

Paper short abstract:

Eastern European cities are marked by the radically different property regimes of socialism and neo-liberal capitalism. Temporalities collide and material, political and legal tensions arise. By looking at such tensions, I ask what do these cities tell us about a future liberated from injustice?

Paper long abstract:

Today’s Eastern European city is marked by the tension between neo-liberal urban developments and the material remnants of socialist past. These materialities overlap and produce dramatic cityscapes of rapid gentrification, violent evictions, ruined neighbourhoods and flashy, steel-and-glass skyscrapers. And they also reflect intersections of vastly different property regimes: the socialist one based on public and collective property and the neo-liberal one centred on the sanctity of private property. Temporalities collide and material, political and legal tensions arise constantly from these intersections.

The past of socialist utopian planning and material redistribution is confronted in postsocialism by rapid transformations based on historical reparations through the processes of restitutions that invoke an idealised interwar past. While fighting evictions caused by restitutions, housing justice activists call for more state acquisitions and expropriations of unused private property. However, anti-capitalist movements in the region hesitate to invoke the abolition of property in societies where still over 80% of the urban population are homeowners. While engaged scholars have shown how this is far from an ideal situation, the mass of homeowners still represents the most relevant material obstacle in front of an urban takeover by large private landlords, ushering the dystopian tenant landscape of Western cities. These are but some of the diverse and contrasting temporalities of the Eastern European city.

By critically looking at such intersections, this paper strives to answer what can the postsocialist city teach us about a liberated future from housing injustice?

Paper short abstract:

Montreal banned horse-drawn carriages in 2019, revealing a clash of temporality between the post-speciesist vision of animal activists and a traditional carriage practice. This ban uncannily mirrored the goals of both a grassroot social movement and a project of urban development.

Paper long abstract:

The horse-drawn carriages in Montreal were banned on December 30, 2019, following 10 years of animal right activism, a decision justified through stories of moral progress. Using ethnography with animal right activists and horse-drawn carriage drivers, I explore the tension between this future-oriented program and a traditional carriage practice marginalized by it. The animal right activists were driven by a vision of a post-speciesist society that they strove to actualize, while the carriage drivers were rather unfolding according to their own temporality.

In this presentation, I will describe a protest that occurred two years after the closure of the industry, in which a group of about 50 activists asked the mayor and condominium promoters to help them “free” the 4 horses still “captives” at the stable. I will show that the future-oriented vision of the grassroot movement uncannily aligned with that of a project of urban development, who seized the land of the stable. Echoing Edward Westermack who asked in (1906) “why facts of a certain type are matters of moral concern, while other facts are not,” I question how preoccupations around the well-being of horses shadowed concerns about gentrification.

Inspired by Anna Tsing (2015), I suggest that ethnography can allow us to notice more-than-human entanglements, such as the carriage activity, that is not oriented toward future aims or goals. Animal right activists also form more-than human entanglements, notably included digital technologies, that also shape their temporality. This research may offer new insights about the growing homelessness in Montreal.