Welfare, neighbourhood and new geographies of diversity: rethinking the ethnography of super-diversity at the margins of the city

Mette Louise Berg & Ben Gidley (Oxford)

Abstract:

This paper presents an experimental collaborative ethnography in progress, based in Elephant and Castle, a central but marginal area of London. While most of the research conducted as part of the recent “convivial turn” in urban studies focuses on public and parochial spaces, our ethnography attempts to excavate quotidian practices of intercultural translation that occur in the hidden micropublics which are shaped by encounters between diverse residents and the welfare state. The ethnography reveals how, as axes of difference proliferate among residents in a super-diverse area, some differences make more of a difference, suggesting a need for more intersectional (rather than additive) understandings of diversity, and foregrounding the workings of inequality and class in structuring the right to the city.

Skateboarding and the City: From Margin to Centre

Iain Borden (University College London)

Abstract

In this talk, I trace the way in which the urban practice skateboarding has moved from a predominantly marginal position in the city – marginal in geographic, cultural and economic terms – to play an increasingly central and/or integrated role in urban cultures and developments. Practised by tens of millions worldwide, skateboarding today makes an important contribution to our current architecture, creative industries, commerce, entrepreneurship and social capital. The talk ranges from California in the 1960s and 1970s to London, Kabul and Indiana in the present day, and from concerns with methodological concerns with history and critical theory to representations in film, music and art.

Relocating Urban Asylum: Forced Migration and the Revanchist Production of Marginality

Jonny Darling (University of Manchester)

Abstract

In 2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide dispersal accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers. This meant the end of asylum accommodation through local authorities in many of the UK’s largest cities. This paper seeks to explore the impact of this shift in asylum provision and consider what this means for the relation between cities and asylum seekers in contemporary Britain. The paper draws on fieldwork in four UK cities (Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and Sunderland), including interviews with local authority representatives, politicians, asylum and refugee support services and asylum seekers themselves. In considering this empirical evidence base, the paper argues that we may see a troubling narrative of political neglect, shrinking accountability and the slow recession of support services and expertise. As the realities of ‘austerity urbanism’ have interacted with the privatisation of asylum support, so we are witnessing the emergence of new assemblages of authority and governance at the urban level. A limited concern with the social needs of asylum seekers, has been replaced with an increasingly revanchist agenda which seeks to both remove those seeking asylum from political debate and to maximise the economic gains to be made from dispersal. In the growing and emerging ‘asylum market’, I argue that the realities of asylum urbanism are far removed from the potential for political change so often associated with the image of the city as a site of refuge. This does not, however, mean giving up on the city as a space for critical political practices. Rather, it demands a reorientation of how asylum is politicised and an approach that takes seriously the informalities of urban life. In concluding, I draw on the experience of these four cities to suggest that whilst the revanchist practices of asylum urbanism gain ground, their margins still represent contested spaces in which the image of an irregular city may be kept alive.

Revanchist Sanitisation or Coercive Care?: The Use of Enforcement and Conditionality to Combat Street Homelessness and Street Culture

Sarah Johnsen (Heriot-Watt University)

Abstract

This paper will examine recent responses to rough sleeping and 'problematic street culture' (e.g. begging and street drinking) in England. It will assess the extent to which the increasing use of enforcement and conditionality in interventions are indicative of a 'revanchist expulsion' of the deviant Other and/or an expression of 'coercive care' for the vulnerable Other. It will conclude that, whilst the recent developments appear, at first glance, to be symptomatic of revanchist sanitisation of public space, closer examination reveals that the situation is actually much more complex than a revanchist reading of the situation might suggest, and perhaps not as devoid of compassion

Silvia Pasquetti (University of Cambridge)

Abstract

This paper builds on recent theorizing about refugee camps as urban sites and about the relationships between the urban poor and refugees (e.g. Agier, Malkki and Bauman 2002; Sanyal 2013) to connect and compare two localities of urban marginality across the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank: a West Bank refugee camp and the Arab districts of an Israeli city. Drawing on ethnographic research within and across the camp and the city it traces the historical and ongoing ties between Palestinian refugees and urban minority citizens while exploring their differing sense of injustice, politics, and morality. I argue that a focus on place (camp versus city) and legal-political status (refugees versus minority citizens) alone cannot explain how and why, despite their ethnonational and kin ties, these two segments of poor Palestinians differ in how they perceive and articulate issues of survival and politics. Explaining these differences requires exploring the forms of sociolegal control they experience in their everyday lives. Specifically, it requires studying their distinct relationships with the Israeli state’s coercive agencies and, for the refugees, their protracted relationship with humanitarian organizations. The paper concludes by calling for more comparative research on the role of agencies of control in the articulation of practices and meanings of survival and politics in localities of urban marginality. A focus on the interplay between control and space can help bring the urban poor and refugees in the same analytic framework thus enriching ongoing urban sociology debates about urban marginality.

Sobia A. Kaker (London School of Economics/Newcastle University)

Followed by Cities at Cambridge: Post-Graduate Networking Mixer

Abstract

In an environment of increased urban insecurity, ‘a new military urbanism’ (Graham, 2010) dictates the logic of urban form. In global cities such as Karachi too, there an obsession with attaining total security—especially around financial centers, ports, residential areas and embassy districts. As a result, passage-point architectures most familiar to airports are transcribed on everyday urban landscapes. The emerging enclaves are created in response to heightened perceptions of vulnerability within a city wrecked by frequent bouts of unexpected violence. But it is important to look beyond the already familiar physical architectures of enclaved cities per se. By focusing merely on the physical architectures of securitized cities—their fortified walls, checkpoints, and barriers—risks an environmentally deterministic perspective. It suggests that these constructions work completely or that their effects can be assumed from their appearance. Complex interconnections between gated enclaves and the rest of the city are easily overlooked. This is especially so when it becomes clear that immense and ongoing labor is required to even create the pretense that relations between the inside of enclaves and the broader city can ever be fully scrutinized and filtered within huge, dynamic, and highly mobile megacities.

This presentation draws on empirical references from Karachi, a dynamic Pakistani megacity of 20 million residents. It will centre on the dynamic relationships between those who perform and work the boundaries of enclaves and those who live and use enclaved spaces. Through this perspective it will highlight everyday circulations--an otherwise neglected aspect of urban enclaves—as a productive force. By addressing the neglected question of how the transformation of megacity landscapes into uneven patchworks of securitized enclaves works to produce novel experiences and forms of urban political life, this presentation answers important questions: How is the new security city, the archipelago of gated enclaves, lived and experienced? And with what consequences?

(Im)mobilizing Bangkok: motorcycle taxi drivers, street protest, and the fragility of power in the Thai capital

Claudio Sopranzetti (University of Oxford)

Abstract

This talk explores the mobility of motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok as well their adoption of it during the Red Shirt protests of 2010. I analyze how the drivers' physical mobility through traffic shapes their ability to find unexplored routes in the social, economic, and political landscapes of the city and to create paths for action where other urban dwellers see a traffic jam or a political gridlock. Such ability, I argue, directed their roles in the street protest which blocked the center of Bangkok. When the everyday life of the city broke down, this talk will show, the drivers took advantage of their position in urban circuits of exchange to emerge as central political actors in contemporary Bangkok by blocking, slowing down, or filtering the circulation of people, goods, and information which they normally facilitate. In this sense, they reveal the fragility of state power in the Thai capital and its inability to control these mobile subjects.

Intimate City: Violence, Gender, and Ordinary Life in Delhi Slums

Ayona Datta (University of Leeds)

Abstract

In this paper I use the notion of the intimate city to examine how violence as symbolic, material, embodied and structural becomes an ‘ordinary’ aspect of everyday life in Delhi slums. In particular I am interested in how an intimate governmentality of the state is reworked into intimate gender relationships in this slum, and how this in turn provides a space to its residents to argue for a ‘right to intimacy’ as a right to the city. To do this I focus on the slum as the ‘intimate city’ a space where a violence of law, urban development and intimacy are woven into its material and everyday conditions, where violence is domesticated and rendered as part of the everyday through what Veena Das calls a ‘descent of violence into the realm of the ordinary’. I argue that intimate lives of slum residents living in an exclusionary city challenges the constructed divisions between public and private, rural and urban, tradition and modernity, spectacular and ordinary, by calling into attention how gendered agency manifests not by entering the public realm, but by normalizing intimate sexualized violence across public and private realms.

Nishat Awan (University of Sheffield)

What role do dissenting practices have in the making of urban space? Using two diverse examples, from London and Lahore, I will focus on the performativity of such practices and on the support structures required to make them successful. In London, the focus will be on the recent Occupy movement, and occupation itself as a mode of urban spatial protest. In Lahore, the focus will be on the role of satire and mediatised modes of protest.

Drawing on mapping work carried out by Masters students in Architecture at Sheffield University, the analysis in London will focus on the role of everyday practices in the day-to-day running of the St Pauls camp. The Occupy movement has brought occupation as a mode of protest to a wider audience and has shown how everyday practices of cooking, sleeping and learning together can become powerful modes of action in urban space.

In the case of Lahore, the focus will be on forms of political satire and how these manifest themselves in urban space. In a country that has been under colonial rule, intermittent dictatorships, and where currently public space is under constant threat, the occupation of urban space is not always an easy option. Instead, the mode of protest is ventriloquized, meaning that the medium through which dissent is articulated becomes increasingly important. Historically, this has taken many forms, for example putli tamashae (travelling puppet shows), satirical television characters such as Uncle Sargam, and the important role that wall painting still plays in delivering political slogans and messages.

Despite the very different forms of protest, the talk will focus on the important role that urban space plays in hosting cultures of dissent.

Theorising Cities Now: Putting Comparison to Work for Global Urban Studies

Dr Jennifer Robinson (University College London)

Abstract

This paper argues that global urbanism, the commitment to producing an understanding of the urban which is potentially open to the experiences of all cities – to a world of cities – is best served by a comparative imagination. The spatiality of theorising the urban experience maps well onto the core elements of a comparative imagination – thinking across different “cases” to produce conceptualisations which contribute to wider understandings of the processes being analysed, and which might then, in turn, be considered in relation to other contexts or cases. However, as the comparative methods which have conventionally underpinned urban studies are not well placed to serve the project for a more global urbanism the paper will present some tactics for a reformatted comparativism. Reconfiguring the tactics and form of the comparative imagination aligns with significant issues in the wider theorisation of the urban which are currently provoking considerable debate. Can we understand cities as assemblages of circulating phenomena, or as outcomes of wider social processes? To what extent is it possible to configure a conceptually adequate theorisation of the urban? How do concepts of cities relate to the phenomenal elements of the urban world which present themselves to us through observations and encounters? These rather abstract theoretical debates are analytically closely connected to the practical challenges of producing a more international urban studies. Above all, an orientation to an open and revisable conceptualisation of the urban, willing to work with, puzzle through and make room for the differentiation and diversity of urban life is essential for enabling the emergence of a more inclusive global urban theoretical practice.