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P149


Unsettled urban policies as part of city-making 
Convenors:
Cansu Civelek (University of Tübingen)
Sebastian Ramirez (Princeton University)
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Formats:
Panel
Mode:
Face-to-face
:
Facultat de Geografia i Història 220
Sessions:
Thursday 25 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid

Short Abstract:

This panel proposes "unsettled city-making" as a lens to analyze incomplete urban policies not as failures, but as inherent elements of city-making. We explore the spatiotemporal dynamics of unsettled policies and their impact on policy-making and claim-making.

Long Abstract:

Anthropological studies of policy have fruitfully unsettled positivist understanding of policies beyond simple outcomes of governmental function that carry out official agendas, instead discerning their complexity, assembling various elements and accumulating political and economic interests. This approach invites a consideration of what we call unsettled city-making: the ways in which truncated, incomplete urban development policies are in fact part of the messy process of making and remaking the city. Accordingly, rather than seeing the uncompleted nature of policies, policy gaps, or policy ruptures as failures in planning or implementation, we analyze unsettled-ness as an inherent element in planning, unsettling the expected closure of completion and instead opening new horizons of the city-making process. We open a theoretical debate on temporal and conjunctural thinking that shows the ways policies are designed or kept unsettled at spatiotemporal and conjunctural needs and interests of various parties involved in urban policy making. Failure here becomes not an endpoint but a claim, a staging area, or a plateau from which other city futures can be built or imagined. This panel invites submissions that investigate unsettledness in a variety of urban planning domains - from transportation to housing, deservingness, social movements, or policing - and examine a multitude of concerns - from criminalization and marginalization to political polarization, to political organizing, and budget-making. Together, our presentations will demonstrate how unsettled urban policy reinforces structural inequalities, and ongoing political processes, yet, significantly, can open new and unexpected avenues for claim-making and emergent strategies for navigating institutional demands.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -
Session 2 Thursday 25 July, 2024, -