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- Convenors:
-
Asta Vonderau
(Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
Jens Adam (Universität Bremen)
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- Stream:
- Urban
- Location:
- VG 4.104
- Start time:
- 27 March, 2017 at
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel investigates practices and strategies of sharing and the ways in which those practices shape new socio-material environments - urban ecologies.
Long Abstract:
The notion of 'sharing' points to a series of interwoven cultural, economic, political and infrastructural processes that are at the heart of how the modern city is being reshaped and reimagined as an inclusive space. Sharing practices are evident not only in relation to what is labeled as "sharing economies" in the policy or city planning discourse, but they can be observed across a wide range of sites and social contexts. As for instance sharing can mean interactions between individuals and groups involved in common urban spaces; it can relate to the distributions of urban commons, such as food, electricity or water; or it can be observed in relation to streams of information and knowledge circulating in the city through formal or informal networks. Sharing leads to inclusiveness, innovation and creativity, but also to conflicts, new forms of commodification, threats to labor rights, and to an increasingly complex infrastructuring of urbanity.
This panel approaches the practices and spheres of sharing not as separate domains, but as intersecting, and as resulting in new socio-material formations of "shared" urban life - urban ecologies. We invite to investigate such crossovers, including, for instance, the re-negotiations of city space between individual and local initiatives and official city planning and infrastructuring projects; dis-connections, that is, subversions of established flows of information and the establishing of alternative information channels through public protest; or re-memberings - changing concepts of belonging which are defined through sharing.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Asta Vonderau (Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany)
Paper short abstract:
My paper invites to contest popular imaginaries of smart urban environments as especially democratic and sustainable by highlighting their infrastructural materialities and entanglements in global IT markets and resource flows.
Paper long abstract:
In popular media and political discourse, smart cities are often described as sustainable, creative and democratic spaces enabling participation and equal distribution of information and services among different communities by means of information technology and ubiquitous connectivity. Free WiFi, home automation, or smart traffic navigation systems represent technological solutions that shape the ways urban spaces and knowledge are shared. Such representations, however, only include economically profitable effects of urban digitization and look at online services from the perspective of IT consumers.
My paper invites to open up and contest the notion of sharing and to analyze smart connectivity from the perspective of its production. Which infrastructures and natural ressources are needed in order to make smart urban environments functional? How are those environments entangled in a broader context of global IT markets, labor relations, and resource flows? What inequalities become visible when analyzing how connectivity and sustainability are distributed between the smart urban centers and peripheral industrial sites of digital capitalism?
Karin Salomonsson (Division of Ethnology, Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the potential success of the so called sharing economy, focusing on power relations and social practices, emotions and cultural meanings of lending and borrowing as a way of stretching existing urban ecologies.
Paper long abstract:
"Why buy when you can borrow?" This slogan comes from a Swedish digital platform intended to facilitate loans between neighbours. Together with a number of similar initiatives it makes up the "third generation" of non-profit operations in the sharing economy. Hopes are high that sharing will promote social, environmental and economic sustainability and present innovative solutions to the problematic effects of an advanced consumer culture.
If more and more people get involved in practices of sharing, some predict that social networks will be strengthened, and a feeling of community and mutual trust will grow. But it is not self-evident that everyday sharing, like for example borrowing, in itself should lead to transforming existing socio-material environments. At present I am conducting a research project on how social relations and power structures, morality and normativity, and networks of trust and dependence are affected by borrowing and lending - and vice versa. The ethnography illustrates that disputes and differences of opinion about the advantages and etiquette of borrowing are frequent, and poses the question of who will be included and who will have difficulties getting invited into these new urban ecologies of inter-personal schemes for sharing? In reality the sharing economy faces an uphill struggle.
"Sharing" appears as an ideologically and politically contested practise, with no inherent meaning in itself. In this paper I hope to critically scrutinize its use and definitions through looking at material-discursive agency and different enactments, especially concerning the emotional turmoil of lending and borrowing.
Alexander Schwinghammer (Bauhaus University Weimar)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation is about the cultural practices of city-based start-up food producing entrepreneurship in Germany. The paper explores the multi-layered connections, which constitute a field of start-up culture situated within differing discourses of sustainability.
Paper long abstract:
A seemingly rampant system of food speculation, subsidizing and circulation questions present notions of food security. Food scandals, scarcity of resources, economic deterioration and climate catastrophes forcibly put the vulnerability of a globally connected network of food on the map. Even more, the spatial decoupling of food production from food consumption of an increasing number of people living in cities contributes to this impression of uneasiness.
The flourishing trend of "locavorism", the attempt to construct one's own diet from regional resources, is an evident symptom to this development. While a growing number of people live in cities, a significant figure appears to have less reservations towards food items grown in their vicinity then produce harvested in far-away places. Food start-up projects emerge, following the slogan »bring production back to the city«. They attempt - or at least proclaim - to support a local, urban market through their produce harvested in close range. These new forms of urban food production are visible imbedded in economic regimes. Even though maximizing profit in a narrow understanding of economy may not be the key frame of reference here, alternative forms of exchange develop within differing economic logics.
Linking the notion of "entrepreneurship" with (culturally constructed) expectations of sustainability this paper inquires "ecopreneurship" as a particular formation within start-up culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, emphasis is put on the cultural practices of urban food producers in Germany. Hereby, questions of status, distinction, social participation and promotional culture complement the entrepreneurial aspect of urban food production.
Jens Adam (Universität Bremen)
Paper short abstract:
How can classical ethnographic methods and more co(l)laborative methods be combined into contemporary research designs on urban cosmopolitics?
Paper long abstract:
Contemporary cities are known, shaped, shared and dwelled in many sites and in multifarious ways. Consequently city life has been described as an "assemblage of discrepant activities" that "seem to pile up on each other" (AbdouMaliq Simone). It becomes increasingly difficult to detect an authority or a discourse, which can claim to represent a city as a whole. These developments pose challenges for classical approaches of urban ethnography, which have been discussed on a methodological as well as on a conceptual level. Based on experiences in building up a network, which brought together a wide range of urban actors from different German cities, I want to contribute to these debates. This network was created as an open forum, in which emerging questions arising from practical engagements focussing on the development, shaping, use or dwelling of urban space, could be discussed, reflected and dealt with. "Problematizations" of current city life and politics were curated in a col(l)aborative process and provided a point of departure for further inquiries into trajectories of contemporary "urban cosmopolitics" (Blok/Farías).