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- Convenors:
-
Cansu Civelek
(Central European University KEE Nador U. 9, 1055, Budapest. HU 18118463)
Sebastian Ramirez (Princeton University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- 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, -Arjin Tas (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the post-conflict Diyarbakır, located in the Kurdish region of Turkey, this paper explores the relationship between lengthy urban redevelopment processes and counterinsurgency strategies with a particular focus on dispossession and displacement.
Paper long abstract:
In August 2015, after the declarations of self-governance in the Kurdish region of Turkey, Sur (the old town of Diyarbakır) turned into an urban front in the armed conflicts between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK. Through bulldozering, urgent expropriation, and urban redevelopment, more than 22,000 low-income Kurdish inhabitants were forcefully displaced and dispossessed. The counterinsurgent urban redevelopment project in Sur has not been finished and seems paused. The systematic subjugation of the low-income Kurdish population has not remained limited to the areas of self-governance declarations or clashes, either. Recently, inner Bağlar, the poorest and densest urban section of Diyarbakır, has become the target of urban redevelopment. Like Sur, the project of Bağlar proceeds extremely slowly, even though all of inner Bağlar has been declared “risky” and a pilot area has been expropriated on paper.
Based on ethnographic research in Diyarbakır, this paper explores the relationship between lengthy urban redevelopment processes and counterinsurgency with a particular focus on dispossession and displacement. It conceptualizes urban regeneration processes as a part of governance (governing the city, dissent, conflict, and counterinsurgency). I argue that the lengthy, non-transparent, and ambiguous urban redevelopment processes form a threatening space, aiming to disseminate the clustered, political, and mobilized low-income Kurdish families. The constant threat of displacement, facing empty lots and dilapidated surroundings, and police points set up at corners all lead to (de)securitization and depopulation in both Sur and inner Bağlar, creating a space that prevents political mobilization and insurgency.
Ansar Jasim (Free University of Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at how the claim of “ruralization” is integral part of the struggle over “making the city” and reveals how class is negotiated through this notion in the city of Baghdad.
Paper long abstract:
This paper looks at how the claim of “ruralization” is integral part of the struggle over “making the city” and reveals how class is negotiated.
Sadr City is the largest and most densely populated district of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. It was built in the 60s as a top-down government project to house poor rural migrants. The district´s grid system and small houses were meant to prevent the continuation of what was thought of as “rural life”. Although it is home today to at least one third of Baghdad´s population and huge part of the city´s workforce, it has been framed ever since as “another” space and the place of “the other” by the political elites and the population of the “older” districts.
Successive military putsches stopped the implementation of the full plan for the district. This led to the district´s population largely doing auto-construction of their houses, streets and other infrastructures. Still, today the district and its inhabitants are framed as agents of a process of “ruralization” of the “civilized” Baghdad. Sadr City is seen as “unmaking the city”. This becomes even more relevant in the light of the latest urban development processes in Baghdad.
The paper explores ethnographically how the making of the district and the perceived unmaking of Baghdad is produced in the everyday life of Sadr City´s population.
Based upon extended fieldwork in Baghdad this paper offers insight into how the “unsettled city-making” of one district is essential to the making of Baghdad.
Felipe Fernandez
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines forms of state abandonment in the port-city of Buenaventura, Colombia. It ethnographically analyses a state-led project (Plan Todos Somos PAZcífico) and look at the (political, social, and material) junctures it generates
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses the recent political trajectories of the water infrastructure system in the Colombian port-city of Buenaventura. The city, located in southwestern Colombia, has been shaped by high rates of violence, racial segregation, infrastructural breakdowns, and irregular patterns of urbanization. Moreover, it has been marked by precarious urban development policies both by the local and the central governments. Buenaventura is principally inhabited by impoverished Afro-Colombian communities and hosts the biggest port of the country, which have led to several social and material inequalities. Drawing on ethnographic material and official documents, the paper explores the state-led interventions– and the abandonment they produce - on the water infrastructure system in the city. The system is highly deficient, forcing the population to improvise access to water and leading to massive political mobilizations. I turn to the term “organized abandonment” proposed by anthropologist Daniel Goldstein to describe forms of simultaneous state involving and neglect, which result in several forms of (urban) precarity. I focus on the Plan Todos Somos PAZcífico (PTSP), a recent development project funded by the World Bank (WB) and the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) and whose main goal, to improve and expand the water infrastructures in the city, has not been attained. In dialogue with anthropological literature on the state and infrastructure, I argue that the PTSP produces forms of (infra)structural violence, material ruination, messiness, and collective anger. Furthermore, I examine the different forms of unsettled-ness the project encapsulates and look at the several (political, social, and material) junctures it generates.
Sebastian Ramirez (Princeton University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines housing policy for victims of the war in Colombia, asking how the imagination of better futures encounters the limits of structural violence, and how quotidian acts of living on can undermine official visions of the good, opting for emergent strategies of the good for now.
Paper long abstract:
Among Colombian urbanists the city of Soacha is such a model of dysfunction that its name has been turned into a benchmark of unplanning. Soacha-ization means to decay due to improper planning, fecklessness, or disinterest. The city’s famed disorder is often attributed to its exponential growth, fed largely by those seeking safety from the country’s war. In 2010, the government launched an ambitious program to build 100,000 free homes for Colombia’s neediest, especially those displaced by the war. 2000 of these homes were built in Soacha. The projects were built in previously discarded lots, in sites with few basic services, and without consultation from local leadership. The focus on housing illuminates official understandings of the ravages of war, the sorts of victims produced in its wake, and the kinds of action that could delineate novel futures for the country. I explore how home ownership came to be associated with reparation, closure, and the end of war. Thinking alongside families who have become disenchanted with their new homes invites a different understanding of the effects the war in Colombia and how relations of survival, care, and responsibility can be reconfigured around ideas of the home. The Soacha-ization of repair born from the disconnect between expectations of closure and the precarity of everyday lives, queries how the imagination of better futures encounters the hard limits of structural violence, and how quotidian acts of living on can undermine official visions of the good, opting instead for emergent strategies of the good for now.
Cansu Civelek (Central European University KEE Nador U. 9, 1055, Budapest. HU 18118463)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores long-lasting uncertainties of urban policies on a slums zone in Eskişehir, Turkey which have led to multi-layered forms of ruination, abandonment, depopulation of a massive landscape, and dispossession of its residents – both older residents and refugee newcomers.
Paper long abstract:
Karapınar zone in Eskişehir has been subject to urban renewal initiatives of municipal governments since 2011 which have been repeatedly disrupted due to political and financial conflicts among various stakeholders of the gecekondu renewal projects leading to an uneven restructuring of urban space and abandonment of massive landscape, buildings, as well as its residents. The ongoing process of abandonment and the future uncertainties also resulted in the depopulation of the zone that has caused not only spatial ruination but also social decay.
On the other hand, designated to be one of the satellite cities in Turkey, Eskişehir has been a city where refugees under International Protection, mainly from Afghanistan, have been emplaced. During the process of abandonment and depopulation, therefore, Karapınar has become a place where refugees have settled. Despite the initial promises of modernization and spatial revival, the paper ethnographically investigates spatio-temporal dynamics of these disrupted renewal initiatives that resulted in spatial and social loss. The paper discusses multiple forms of socioeconomic and political abandonment of its both older residents and newcomers, as well as transgression, affective politics, conflicts, and also emerging sociabilities among the policy makers and residents.
Enkelejda Sula-Raxhimi (Saint Paul University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the urban challenges of the Haitian capital city Port-au-Prince in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the urban governance – with its logics, discourses, actors and materiality – to respond to such challenges.
Paper long abstract:
The Haitian capital has long been an urban space with a great geospatial divide between the wealthier, living in tightly gated hilltop communities and the poor, mostly the displaced ones who are forced to reside in slums and poor neighborhoods along the harbor and on the foot of the hills. The 2010 earthquake exacerbated the inequalities and the social divide in the city, which led to pushing the poorest displaced Haitians out of the urban areas, by blurring and extending the boundaries of the city into informal urban spaces. The perfect example of such processes is the creation of the township called Canaan, extended about 27 km to the North of the Haitian capital, and which forced the Haitian government to adopt certain urban policies to formalize the informal settlements.
But what housing and urbanization challenges were created or amplified following the 2010 disaster? How natural and climate disasters in Haiti reactivate matters – policy processes, urban designs, resilience and solidarity – and bring new, albeit imperfect, urbanisation policy solutions to city’s growing challenges?
I argue that the economic fragility, political unrest, colonial legacies, the high risk of natural disaster and the effects of climate change, exacerbate the inequalities along racial and social divides by looking into how housing needs were met and dealt with in the management of this crisis.
Gardner Bovingdon (Indiana University)
Paper short abstract:
Urban planning in post-socialist cities is chaotic because so much has been in play: changing property rights and employment patterns, social and political status, shifting lines of authority, and sharply divergent visions of a good city. Almaty's unsettled planning is both symptom and hopeful sign.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will describe the chaotic planning process in contemporary Almaty as both a symptom of the profound tensions of post-socialist transition and a positive sign that Kazakhstan, though hardly a democracy, has some space for genuine contention over public space, affordable housing, access to the city, and livability. I will draw on textual research and fieldwork conducted in the city on seven trips between 2009 and 2024.
Socialist Almaty was famously a "garden city," planned with abundant parks, tree-lined boulevards, and pleasant neighborhoods. Given that Soviet internal passports (propiska) limited who could move there, the city was famously livable for urban workers and party elites alike. It was both the political and cultural capital of the Kazakh SSR.
Political and financial elites in Almaty today want to transform it into a global city on the steppe, with a leading role in Central Asian finance and business. Developers have thrown up increasingly expensive luxury towers and built shopping malls for the monied and middle classes, unhousing many longtime residents. Meanwhile, preservationists lobby, mostly fruitlessly, to preserve the architectural character and distinctive neighborhoods of the urban core. Urban activists struggle to protect public spaces, keep affordable housing from being torn down - or simply falling down, since muchwas built in the 1950s with an expected lifespan of 25 years - and keep outlying _mikroraions_ (working-class suburbs with huge concrete housing complexes) from turning into slums or ghost towns, or both at once.
Ainhara Del Pozo Nogales (Universitat de Barcelona) Guillermo Aguirre Núñez (Universitat de Barcelona)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Barcelona's shift from tourism-centered projects to sustainable and inclusive initiatives, examining projects such the Superilla, Protegim les escoles, and thoroughfare reconfigurations through an anthropological lens, unraveling the complexities of "unsettled city-making."
Paper long abstract:
Barcelona's urban landscape has undergone profound transformations over the last decade, moving away from grand tourist-centered endeavors to embrace inclusivity, environmental sustainability through community-centered urban policies. Initiatives such as Superilla, green axes, and the reimagining of major thoroughfares, including Via Laietana, Las Ramblas, and Consell de Cent, embody this paradigm shift towards a city designed for its neighbors. Employing an anthropological perspective, this paper scrutinizes the intricate dynamics of "unsettled city-making," analyzing both intended impacts and unforeseen consequences.
Beyond altering the physical urban fabric, our research delves into the profound effects on urban mobility, territorial configuration, and shifts in urban space. We propose to examine these manifold interventions from the same lens, more specifically, from the "Protegim Escoles'' project to the iconic Ramblas transformation in detail, revealing how their execution undergoes significant alterations due to controversies, social demands, and disagreements within the municipal government. Positioned amidst the thematic framework of the "construction of unstable cities'' panel, this anthropological exploration reframes urban policies as intrinsic elements woven into the ongoing city development process, emphasizing their role in creating a city that prioritizes its residents. It sheds light on the spatiotemporal dynamics of unresolved policies and their impact on policy formulation and societal claims. The study challenges conventional perspectives on urban policies, illustrating how instability can catalyze new possibilities and emergent strategies in response to institutional demands. The urban planning shift in Barcelona emerges as a complex tapestry shaped by diverse factors and actors, providing valuable insights into contemporary urban development dynamics.