Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between sex workers, local residents, politicians and the police in a contested space Dublin city centre.

Paper long abstract:

The Celtic Tiger heralded many changes, not only to the social and economic landscape of Dublin city, but was also apparent in the built environment. As former tired dilapidated areas of the city became gentrified, one such area north of the Liffey, emerged as a highly contested space. The commissioning of a new tramline and its subsequent works, forced many street-based sex workers from their traditional patches along the dark secluded alleyways of Arbour Hill, back into residential areas, and into direct conflict with local residents.

This paper explores the impact of these changes on the lives of sex workers and their struggles to survive amid the hostility of local residents in the form of nightly protests, a diminishing client base and increased police surveillance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper attends to the social and material work through which settlers in Mumbai compose, maintain and upgrade the water connections they need to live. I suggest that an attention to their everyday practices around water infrastructure disturbs normative approaches to participatory urban governance, and instead directs our attention to the contentious politics of maintaining urban citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

Where urban citizenship has often been theorized by attending to the politics of housing, in this paper I attempt to think through questions of citizenship by attending to the production, maintenance and upgradation of water infrastructure by settlers and other marginalized residents in the city of Mumbai, India. As the city unrolls new urban infrastructure projects, settlers make claims on the city by constantly claiming and upgrading their social and political connections to the city's water network. An attention to the materiality of this process- as settlers move from using their bodies, to visible plastic pipes, to a more concealed steel water system - not only reveals the aspiration that settlers have for an upgraded water infrastructure. It also reveals the political processes through which these networks are improved and maintained. By attending to the contentious politics through which settlers upgrade their infrastructure in the city, I show how their approaches disturb the normative imaginations implicit in projects of 'participatory urban governance' and instead directs our attention to the restive and contentious process through which tentative yet substantive urban citizenship is made over time among the city's most marginalized residents.

Paper short abstract:

Urban renewal produces sites of contested citizenship. In a social housing estate in Utrecht, NL, gentrification policies impose a discourse of good citizenship on the tenants, based on social upward mobility. The tenants' views of their lives, the state and political agency counter this discourse.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses how urban renewal produces sites of contested citizenship. It presents a case of urban renewal of a social housing estate in the underprivileged neighborhood of Overvecht, in the city of Utrecht, the Netherlands. In this neighborhood, apartment buildings are being thoroughly renovated or demolished, and new single family dwellings are built of which many are for sale. The national government, the municipality and the housing associations, through policies that aim at gentrification, impose a utopian discourse of "good citizenship" on these allegedly dystopian estates. In this discourse, the good citizens are those tenants who actively participate in meetings and show a potential for upward social mobility. The paramount "good citizens" are those who are potential future home owners, as it is believed that owners invest in both their private property and the neighborhood as a whole. Tenants are prompted to change their life projects and to take responsibility in the redesign of their neighborhood in which their homes disappear and their social networks dissolve. I show how tenants, actively or passively, counter the ideal of the active and potentially home-owning citizen, as such contesting the formulations of good citizenship. Based on their life histories, and especially those experiences with the state and state-like actors, they develop alternate pictures of their relationship with the state, their political agency and their possibilities for the future. Through these pictures and their practices, they challenge the notions of citizenship inherent in the renewal policies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores socio-cultural implications and effects of gentrification of the sex industry in Okinawa, Japan. It ethnographically illuminates how local authorities and local community members including sex workers are involved in the politics of citizenship under urban development.

Paper long abstract:

The red-light district is a marker of sexual culture as the object of regulation and cleansing and as the agency which brings about diverse responses to social changes. The red-light district is exists as part of urban community and landscape by being formed, regulated and eradicated. Based on fieldwork in the main island of Okinawa, this paper will explore how local residents, sex workers and local government officials negotiate and mediate sexual culture in the process of cleaning-up the red-light district.

The main island of Okinawa in the Pacific Ocean to the southwest of mainland Japan is a place where diverse forms of sex industry have flourished including the Okinawan traditional sexual industry, Japanese military sexual slavery during World War II and a control system for US military personnel after the War. In 2010, two local governments launched campaigns to gentrify the red-light districts as part of urban development in Okinawa. These campaigns are actively supported by the police, women's groups and community groups to protect public morals and the youth and to establish a safe community. As a result of the two public campaigns, street sex work has dramatically increased in the red-light district in the capital of Okinawa, Naha City, rather than having been suburbanised like in Western European cities. This paper explores how local residents, sex workers and local government officials negotiate and mediate sexual culture, and re/construct the notion of citizenship as a result of the gentrification of the red-light districts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the effects of slum upgrading on the lives of the population, especially their position in society and their political subjectivity. It focuses on a slum upgrading project in Recife (Brazil) that removes the population from shacks at riverbeds to new housing estates.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the effects of slum upgrading on the lives of slum dwellers, especially on their position in society and their political subjectivity. It zooms in on the implementation of Prometrópole, a World Bank funded slum upgrading project in Recife that removes the population from shacks close to rivers to new housing estates. In this project, the state embraces participatory democracy and stresses the growing inclusion of the poor as citizens of the Brazilian nation-state. The question that inspires this paper is: 'How does the "citizenship agenda" employed by the Brazilian state relate to practices of political belonging in the urban periphery, characterized by social exclusion and violence?' What are the consequences of these projects for political life and political subjectivity in the urban periphery? On the basis of ethnographic research the paper concludes that the upgrading of poor neighbourhoods can indeed increase feelings of belonging and inclusion among the poor population. At the same time, however, the empty participatory procedures and the stress on the obligation to become good citizens, have the effect of disregarding the needs of the poor. Interestingly, far from being docile subjects, the target population involved themselves in illegal reconstructions and transactions, once they received the new houses. Many creatively manipulated the opportunities offered by the project. This shows that extra legal means remain an important way for the poor to defend their "right of being", including their right to shape urban space.

Paper short abstract:

Restructuring and renewal of the metropolises by constructing modern high-rising housing complexes and shopping malls have become common features in India. This paper focuses on how restructuring of geographical space of Kolkata exclude some from the purview of citizenship and thereby redefining both the space and the connotation of citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

During the last two decades, Kolkata, the principal metropolis of eastern India has witnessed the construction of highly priced housing complexes and shopping malls in spaces previously occupied mostly by sick and small manufacturing factories. Factories typify a particular population with a distinctive culture. The occupation of this space by modern housing complexes and shopping malls with both horizontal and vertical expansion has created a kind of citizenship, which is exclusionary in the sense that common people find it hard to enter these places. This is a new phenomenon in a city like Kolkata, which is known very much for its warmth and openness. Once Kolkata was known for her warm hospitality to the extent that every visitor to a house was invariably seen-off to the place of his/her boarding of the vehicle---public or otherwise---by the host. A recent survey of three new housing complexes—South City and Udita in the southern fringe and Space Town in the northern part has revealed how entry into these spaces is highly guarded through various methods and thereby making 'others' as aliens. Likewise, the very glossy, fashionable, somewhat different 'world' of a shopping mall prevents the 'commoners' to enter these places. Interestingly, the globalized culture of both the housing complexes and the shopping malls allow spaces consciously for highly localized and even ethnic cultures. This, urban renewal not only redefines citizenship but also through restructuring of spaces prioritizes the social necessities, demands and creates new spaces for all.