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This paper examines how homeless women living in a Hong Kong pedestrian tunnel negotiate gendered urban marginality. Through acts of ‘making home’ and resistance to state cleansing, their subterranean domesticities reveal how care and agency persist within a polarised city.

Paper long abstract

This paper engages with the panel’s concern for space, displacement, and resistance in the polarised global city. It examines how gendered forms of urban marginality are lived and contested through the experiences of three women who inhabit a pedestrian tunnel in Hong Kong. Their ‘underground’ existence exposes the structural violence embedded in urban governance: municipal workers routinely ‘cleanse’ the tunnels, erasing traces of habitation under the guise of hygiene and order. It also reveals the moral hierarchies and social stigma that define who belongs above ground. Yet their narratives and spatial practices refuse this erasure.

Through ethnographic attention to their material practice of hoarding, the paper explores how these women produce alternative modes of dwelling and political presence. The accumulation of objects, often dismissed as disorder, operates instead as a ‘technology of the self’ that reclaims agency and moral worth within a hostile metropolis. By turning a space of passage into a precarious yet defiant home, these women reveal how the polarised city is constantly negotiated from below. The paper thus situates the underground as a critical site where resistance, care, and material reconfiguration intersect to challenge the spatial logics of exclusion.

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Based on ethnographic and cartographic research in periurban Quilpué, this paper shows how wildfire risk is co-produced through kinship, urban expansion, memory, and affect. Post-fire rebuilding reveals tensions between everyday dwelling practices, family networks, and technocratic risk governance.

Paper long abstract

The 2024 Great Fire of Valparaíso revealed not only the material impacts of wildfire, but also long-standing struggles over space, governance, and belonging in periurban neighborhoods such as Pompeya Sur in Quilpué. In areas shaped by irregular urbanization and transgenerational land occupations, post-fire interventions have intensified spatial control and risk management, often clashing with residents’ everyday practices of dwelling and rebuilding.

Drawing on ethnographic and cartographic research, this paper argues that wildfire risk cannot be understood as an inherent environmental condition nor as an arbitrary event. Rather, risk emerges as a co-production of kinship relations, urban expansion, migratory trajectories, and environmental transformations. By tracing how families in Pompeya Sur have expanded, subdivided, and reconstructed their homes across hillsides and ravines since the mid-twentieth century, the paper argues that kinship operates not only as a social system, but also as a mode of spatial production that both parallels and contests dominant urban planning logics.

Practices of dwelling, building, and rebuilding, often carried out in tension with post-disaster governance frameworks, reveal how residents rework space beyond official rhythms of intervention and control. Family networks appear simultaneously as resources for remaining in place and as forces that complicate technocratic approaches to risk and displacement. Engaging relational and non-dualist perspectives on territory, the paper proposes understanding risk as a dynamic relation shaped not only by human-environment relations, but also by memory, affect, and everyday negotiations over land. In doing so, it contributes to debates on displacement and urban contestation in Latin American cities.

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Based on an ethnography of Uncular Street’s transformation into a "Gastronomy Street," this study explores how locals conform to or resist displacement. Using Lefebvre and Halbwachs, it argues social memory acts as a social, cultural and political tool to challenge neoliberal urban interventions.

Paper long abstract

In this study, I investigate the transformation of Uncular Street and its impact on the perceptions and experiences of the street residents and shop owners in relation to production of space and social memory. Uncular street is one of the historical market streets in Istanbul in Türkiye. With urban transformation project, the street is transformed into “Gastronomy Street” by the municipality (Yaman, 2021). Stylish third-wave coffee shops and restaurants opened, while most of the old traditional shops selling household goods to the neighbors closed gradually. Reactions among shop owners varied significantly; some are displaced by implicit pressures, some adapted to the change by shifting the business, while others managed to stay by rejecting buy-out offers. Residents were largely pushed out by the excessive rents following the decline in economy in Turkey.

To uncover the strategies and tactics developed in the process of urban transformation, the study draws on four months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted on Uncular Street that involves participant observations in cafes and streets, alongside in-depth interviews with 10 inhabitants and 10 shop owners. This study uses Lefebvre’s triad of spatial production (1991), Low’s social construction and production of space (2014) and Halbwachs’ collective memory (1992). The study contributes to discussions of space, politics and memory by demonstrating how this top-down capitalist profit-centred transformation creates a fierce competitive environment triggering bottom-up resistance fueled by social memory that carries the intertwined mechanism of the street’s cultural, historical, and religious heritage through unique tactics derived from everyday life of Uncular Street.

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This paper examines how socio-cultural collectives across the Balkans engage urban space through participatory and activist practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores interventions and documentation through which residents contest governance and imagine alternative urban futures.

Paper long abstract

Urban development and large-scale planning projects increasingly reshape cities across the Balkans, often through processes of eviction, spatial control, and institutional neglect. Alongside these transformations, socio-cultural collectives engage urban space in ways that challenge dominant models of development and governance. This paper examines how such groups intervene in the city through participatory, activist, and collaborative practices that seek to create alternative forms of urban life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Space Tetova in North Macedonia, and similar regional initiatives, the paper explores practices such as collective documentation (films, zines, radio shows), temporary interventions in public space, artistic occupations, and everyday strategies of negotiating visibility and access to urban infrastructure. Rather than framing these practices only as resistance, the paper shows how they function as prefigurative experiments that actively produce new social relations, forms of care, and modes of collective organization. The analysis is informed by dialogical and applied anthropological approaches that emphasize collaboration, reflexivity, and engagement in the field. By focusing on how research and activism intersect in these contexts, the paper demonstrates how anthropology can participate in shaping urban processes while generating knowledge together with communities.

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In Brazil, responses to floods reproduce racialized risk rather than solve it. Technofixes and faith in science operate as supremacist cosmotechnics, reinforcing inequalities and erasing Quilombo counter-histories, while Black and marginalized communities resist and contest these mechanisms.

Paper long abstract

In the Anthropology of Disasters, technofixes have been widely discussed and problematized. During my fieldwork in a flood-prone city in southern Brazil, I found that discourses and actions that align with this mode of disaster governance are perceived, enacted, and contested in a different way in the Global South. Carrying the terror of colonialism into the present, in a rhizomatic mixture of the multiple forms it has taken through local and global transformations, my fieldwork revealed that technologies implemented under the justification of addressing floods are: (1) operated within a precarious network of continuous, overlapping disasters that perpetuate the precarization of specific lives; (2) experienced by state agents and thus by the state itself; and (3) grounded in supremacist ideologies, erasing epistemes and cosmologies that escape the logic of whiteness, while being concealed by a discourse of neutrality and efficiency.

This paper focuses on these three points, emerging from my fieldwork in Encantado, Rio Grande do Sul, after the mapping of high flood-risk areas was used to justify the removal of residents from the city’s most impoverished and Black neighborhood. This occurs in an urban context where the Italian identity of late-nineteenth-century migrants remains symbolically and structurally present. After contextualizing this epistemo-ontological arrangement, I discuss how residents of the Navegantes neighborhood refuse to leave the place where they have lived and propose, through an understanding of body-territory as articulated by quilombola thinker Nêgo Bispo (Santos 2015), alternative ways to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) in the Anthropo/Capitallo/Plantationo/Technocene.

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Urban greening has become a central in building climate-resilient cities. Who has access to greenspace as these areas change their economic value? This paper explores correlations between green gentrification and green redevelopment in Porto Alegre.

Paper long abstract

Globally, urban greening has become a central in building climate resilience. However, research shows correlations between quality greenspace and gentrification. Investments in green infrastructure can increase property values and community dis/replacement (Anguelovski et al., 2022). Unequal accessibility to greenspace could lead to uneven distribution of “ecological and climate impacts in cities” (Grabowski et al., 2022, p. 2). The flooding events from September 2023 and May 2024 in Rio Grande do Sul revealed how disinvestments in stormwater systems in Porto Alegre and the dismantling of environmental protections statewide might have amplified the socioecological impacts of the flooding. In this light, this piece explores how climate policies foreground equity and sustainability as cities are pushed to envision climate-resilient futures. Specifically, drawing on an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, I analyze whether sustainability and climate justice buttress the green redevelopment of the high-end Guaiba waterfront park in Porto Alegre. It seeks to shed light on how real estate projects tackle green gentrification and climate vulnerability risks through public-private partnerships. As such, this piece brings together on-site audiovisual registers and online discussions. Anthropology shows how infrastructure, society, and the environment are interconnected (Vaughn, 2022). Protestors in Porto Alegre contested before yet another flooding episode that “This is not a disaster, this is negligence!” Meanwhile, Indigenous critics stressed that the river was (re)correcting its course. This study asks what climate futures might be foreseeable otherwise when urban climate planning and disaster risk prevention are undertaken with communities and urban ecosystems (Grabowski et al., 2022, Sultana 2014)?

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Kashmir’s road and rail boom is marketed as development but functions as colonial infrastructure: governing movement, enabling securitised access, and remaking land relations. I trace how residents rework, evade, and contest this “connectivity” in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

Rapid road-widening and rail expansion in Kashmir are publicly narrated as “connectivity” and development. This paper examines these projects as colonial infrastructure: material systems designed to govern movement, consolidate territorial control, and reorganise land into a governable and extractable surface. Rather than treating displacement solely as eviction, the paper traces how developmental rule produces everyday forms of geographical and material displacement through checkpoints, sudden closures, rerouted routes, roadside demolitions, and the gradual unmaking of local land-based economies.

Using a street-first perspective, the paper foregrounds how these infrastructures reshape the rhythms of daily life by regulating movement, delay, visibility, and exposure. Developmental spectacle reframes coercive spatial control as welfare, progress, and integration, while obscuring how infrastructure separates a resisting population from land as a social, economic, and political resource.

At the same time, residents do not merely endure these remappings of space. Intellectual, policy-based, and material displacement are contested through vernacular spatial practices: tactical route-making, informal crossings, collective warning networks, and everyday negotiations with infrastructure that rework “connectivity” on lived terms. These practices do not necessarily appear as overt resistance but constitute forms of spatial survival and refusal embedded in ordinary life.

Foregrounding a feminist lens attentive to embodiment, safety, and social reproduction, the paper shows how infrastructural governance is unevenly lived across gender, class, and age, and how everyday mobility becomes a site of political negotiation under developmental rule in Kashmir.

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Post-demolition Lisbon: former residents of Bairro do Relógio use Facebook to mobilise reunions and walks at the former site, resisting stigma and municipal silence while negotiating naming disputes and uneven participation in the neighbourhood’s urban afterlife.

Paper long abstract

Urban governance projects that remove marginalised neighbourhoods often continue after demolition through silence, gaps in official record, and stigmatising public narratives that frame these places as problems rather than histories. This paper examines the post-demolition afterlives of Lisbon’s Bairro do Relógio by asking what displaced residents do with governance once the neighbourhood is gone: how they reclaim presence, reoccupy urban space, and make alternative histories from the street up. The study follows recurring gatherings, picnics, excursions, in which participants revisit former routes, re-identify erased landmarks, and narrate what is no longer materially there, turning absence into a publicly shareable experience. These practices are coordinated through Facebook, used less as a repository of memory than as an infrastructure for mobilising bodies, fixing times and meeting points, circulating practical information, and informally regulating participation.

Methodologically, the paper combines participant observation during reunions and walking interviews, semi-structured interviews, digital ethnography of two online Facebook groups, and archival research attentive to silences and stigma. Findings show that spatial contestation is both outward and inward: residents collectively challenge municipal neglect and stigmatisation by staging modest returns and shared itineraries that re-map the city, while also negotiating internal differences in past status, life trajectory, and later social mobility through disputes over naming, rules of posting, and uneven participation. The paper argues that these practices constitute everyday resistance , curating narratives, and sustaining rhythms of belonging—alongside capitalist urban transformation (Lefebvre 1974).