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- Convenors:
-
Setha Low
(Graduate Center, CUNY)
Vesna Vucinic-Neskovic (University of Belgrade)
- Location:
- International CR
- Start time:
- 17 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Drawing upon existing anthropological research, we propose a panel that imagines our urban future. The papers consider what cities will look like deep into the 21st century and how they will transform to survive. Our objective is to question dominant paradigms and envision new possibilities.
Long Abstract:
Drawing upon existing urban anthropological research on the structures, discourses, and everyday experiences of the historical and contemporary city, we propose a panel that imagines our urban future. The papers consider what cities will look like deep into the 21st century and how they will be transformed to function and survive. We hope to generate an array of scenarios that might guide and/or restrict the domains of urban planning and spatial infrastructure, mobility and security, political and consumption driven economies, political and social movements, and racial, ethnic, gender and class relations at the global and local scales. We also consider patterns of daily life including practices of religious and cultural heritage, bases of social reproduction, and the importance of collective gatherings and festival activities. Our objective is to question dominant paradigms, such as globalization, neoliberalism, post-coloniality, and governmentality through ethnographic analyses of cities and to stimulate our imaginations and envision new intellectual directions and political possibilities.
Agreed participants:
Setha Low, CUNY: slow@gc.cuny.edu
Vesna Vucinic Neskovic, Univerzitet u Beogradu: vvucinic4@gmail.com
Leslie Bank, Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa: lbank@ufh.ac.za
Theodore Bestor, Harvard University: bestor@wjh.harvard.edu
Monica Heller, University of Toronto: monicaheller@utoronto.ca
Junji Koizumi, Osaka University: koizumi@hus.osaka-u.ac.jp
Susana Narotzky, Universitat de Barcelona: narotzky@jamillan.com
Carmen Rial, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC): carmenrial@abant.org.br and Miriam Grossi, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC): miriamgrossi@gmail.com
Rosita Henry, James Cook University: rosita.henry@jcu.edu.au
Andrew Kipnis, The Australian National University.
Mail: andrew.kipnis@anu.edu.au
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Two visions of Montréal compete: capital of a French-speaking nation-state vs. node in a transnational network of multilingual, cosmopolitan global cities. This competition encapsulates a tension common to many debates over the role of the city as nation-states reshape themselves in late modernity.
Paper long abstract:
There are two contrasting visions of Montréal: as the capital of a French-speaking nation-state, or as one node in a transnational network of multilingual, cosmopolitan global cities. This paper will examine how these alternative visions developed, showing how the late arrival of Québécois modernist nationalism comes up against two forms of global circulation: Montréal's colonial history and contemporary forms of transnational circulation of goods and people - at the same time as national identities are commodified on the global tertiary market. It will discuss the reasons why debates over which vision should shape the city's future focus on the terrain of language, pitting efforts to give the city a "French face" against increasing practices of multilingualism. Finally, it will explore how this debates divides the city's residents and would-be residents, linguistically, socially and spatially. The Montréal debate encapsulates one central tension common to many urban futures, namely what the city does for whom as nation-states reshape themselves in late modernity.
Paper short abstract:
The process of micro-urbanization in the rural region of northwestern Guatemala is examined. The principal driving force in this process is migrant workers’ remittances from the United States and the consequences tend to be unfavorable for the local society in spite of seeming development.
Paper long abstract:
Guatemala is a state with a population of 15.4 million, and apart from the mega capital and a few other cities, there are islands of small and miniscule urban cores in the sea of predominantly rural country. A notable change in northwestern region is increasing semi-urbanization of rural communities. Even typical “vacant towns,” hollow settlements with few people at the center, have become remarkably concentrated and permanent urban features started to appear. The degree of urbanization in each location seems to constitute a polar continuum of the type Robert Redfield conceptualized long time ago. But this folk-urban continuum is not organized geographically in space but chronologically in time. Based on this case material, three issues are discussed: (1) those elements that have changed and constitute “urbanization,” (2) causes and driving forces in this process, and (3) the consequences of this transformation. The first issue involves changing settlement pattern, increasing commercialization, formation of dense transportation network and social diversification. The second issue refers to the process of circular migration of undocumented workers between this region and the United States through which a tremendous amount of cash was funneled into traditionalized and immobilized local economy. The third issue is concerned with urban problems of which the most serious is the growth of informal economy and informal sector empowered by illicit human trafficking and drug trading, making the future of this society precarious in spite of its seeming development.
Paper short abstract:
New conceptions of urban space are changing the way we imagine the city. Translocal spaces offer urban dwellers the ability to experience a wider sense of community and the world. These spaces transgress our notions of materiality by expanding the boundaries of transnational social fields.
Paper long abstract:
New conceptions of urban space are changing the way we imagine the city. In particular translocal spaces offer a myriad of possibilities for immigrants and other urban dwellers to experience a wider sense of community and the world. These transformative spaces transgress our usual notions of materiality by expanding the boundaries through transnational experiences and social fields.
Translocality is understood as embodied spatial practices that encompass the experiences, materialities, and imaginaries of the everyday lived in multiple places. In my ethnographic rendering a person who lives in two locations often separated by national boundaries and distance has emotional, linguistic, bodily and material access to both places simultaneously. The metaphors and materialitiesof texting, messaging, instant cash transfers and talking by telephone, Skype or EVO provide an immediacy of experience and the interpenetration of one place into the other(s).
For the individuals and collectivities that live in these circuits, urban life is translocal, inflected with the smells, sounds, feelings, and speech of each place, yet also limited by the structural and physical constraints of corporeality in the same way that Bourdieu argues that class or gender is marked, remembered, and reproduced through habitus. I argue, however, that translocality transcends individual bodies through the affective processes and circulations. Thus translocal space is more than a single person's phenomenology, and instead a spatial emplacement of multiple urban places shared by families, neighborhoods, groups, and communities through the superposition of localities enabled by the space-time compression and mobile technologies of late capitalism.
Paper short abstract:
What will the future of Paris be like? Will Paris be a city "inhabited" by tourists, a Disneyland town or, a global city? From ethnographic research of the everyday life of its immigrants in the districts of Place d'Italie and Belle Ville, we dare to predict what Paris will look like deep into the 21st century.
Paper long abstract:
Paris is a global city, and has been since the 19th century. The eighty seven square kilometers that are often referred to as intramural Paris include increasingly fewer low-income residents. Is Paris gentrifying and opening up to tourists and rich investiteurs while sending to the periphery the French and foreign immigrants who cannot pay the high rents in Europe's cultural capital? Can a city with the elevated population density of more than twenty thousand inhabitants per square kilometer, which is rivaled only by New York and some Asian cities, be transformed into a Disneyland, as once predicted?
Paris has undergone major transformations throughout its history, and its recent past continues this tradition of metamorphosis. The profiles of its neighborhoods are changing because of the waves of immigrants. These are the populations that we want to closely examine to consider the future of the city, immigrants characterized by being owners of their own businesses. We look at how gender, class, generation, sexual orientation and ethnicity influence these migratory processes of entrepreneurs who are owners of ethnic restaurants, clothing cleaners, Internet shops, boulangeries, convenience stores, super-markets, etc. We dare to predict what Paris will look like deep in the 21st century - at least in the districts of Place d'Italie and Belle Ville.
Paper short abstract:
In Southern Europe's present recession, urban futures present a picture where alternative provisioning practices are a mix of political activism and forced necessity. I will address how the concept of degrowth articulates the moral economy and political economy potentials for transforming capitalism.
Paper long abstract:
In Southern Europe the financial crisis has developed into a long term recession. In the context of extremely high unemployment urban dwellers are increasingly resorting to informal practices of mutual help or alternative exchange networks in order to access needed resources including food, clothes and housing. Extended families are being reconstituted as married children take refuge in their parents' house after losing their mortgaged home. New Information Technologies provide the tools for recreating networks of local exchange systems that provision cheap goods through alternative currencies. Proximity ecological food provisioning networks harmonize consumer and producers' objectives of well being.
The picture that emerges for urban futures in the context of crisis is one where alternative provisioning practices are a mix of political activism and forced necessity. While these kinds of practices not directly regulated through the state or the official market are not new, their interpretation as a positive and hopeful phenomenon pegged to a critical economic conceptual paradigm ('degrowth') is indeed a novelty. I will address these practices as moral economic claims towards the failing state and in their political economy potential for transforming the structure of capitalism.
Paper short abstract:
How can industrialization and the degradation of factory work occur together? What does the juncture of these processes imply for the future of newly industrializing urban areas? This paper examines these questions in the context of one newly industrialized mid-sized city in China.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past 20 years, Zouping (Shandong province) has grown from a town of 30,000 people to a city of 350,000. Much of this growth has relied on the success of local textile and food processing factories. But while the vast majority of Zouping's new households depend upon income from factory wages, factory work itself is becoming increasingly despised, especially by young people. The education system often uses the threat of factory work to motivate students—study hard or you will end up a factory worker. How can the denigration of factory work be understood in a part of the world where industrialization has brought rapid economic growth and hitherto unthinkable wealth to the majority of new urbanites? Are the negative views of factory work by youth a reflection of their particular stage of life, the ideological environment in which they are situated, or the social history of industrialization in this part of the world? Or is factory work inherently alienating? While de-industrialization is a destructive plague driving the imagination of urban futures in many parts of the world (including other parts of China), what sorts of urban futures can be imagined in places that are currently industrializing?
Paper short abstract:
Leisurely promenade in the main town street (the corso), is an informal social institution observed throughout the 20th century cities of Serbia and Montenegro. Analyzing the major factors influencing this practice of communal sociality, the paper will deal with the future of the corso in the 21st century.
Paper long abstract:
Leisurely promenade in the main town street, known as the corso (korzo), is an informal social institution observed throughout most of the 20th century cities of Serbia and Montenegro. Its classic form comprises the perpetual circular movement of small gender-mixed groups of town residents along the established walking routes, and simultaneous positioning of male groups that stand alongside the same route. The main purpose of the corso is social engagement through public self-presentation and exchange of information on novelties in the local community life. The town residents' spatial behavior creates segmentation of the corso space according to their simultaneous belonging to various social groups that differ by age, gender, class, ethnicity and religion. Based on the fieldwork study of changes in the corso from the 1930s to the early 2000s in a number of cities of Serbia and Montenegro, changes in the temporal, spatial and social characteristics of the corso will be examined. Accentuating the major factors that determine these changes (such as urban sprawl, reconstruction of the old urban cores, commercialization of leisure time activities, socializing via internet, and ethnic or religious tensions), the paper will deal with the future of the corso in the 21st century.