Tanja Bastia (University of Manchester)

In a number of cities in the Global South, cross-border migrants have played a major role in shaping the urban landscape. This is definitely the case in Argentina, where Bolivian and Paraguayan migration have become increasingly visible over the last few decades (Grimson 2006) and have been directly linked to increasing informality, whether at work or in housing. However, as with most studies of migration, most research to date is influenced by methodological nationalism, and fails to take into account the relationship between migration and space, either in terms of how the particularities of locales shape migrants’ experiences, or the multiple ways in which migrants contribute to the making of these places (Glick Schiller and Çaglar 2009). In this paper we report on preliminary findings from a pilot project carried out in informal settlements in Buenos Aires. The project focuses on place-based political organising by migrants and non-migrants alike in three informal neighbourhoods and includes interviews with grassroots organisations and city authorities. On the basis of the varied and multiple claims made through largely informal political organising around issues of ethnic identity, religion, work or housing, we explore how these claims might contribute to the construction of different visions of the city. Given that visions of cities are the basis on which cities develop, in this paper we explore some of these visions, particularly those put forward by migrant and mixed place-based organisations in urban informal settlements. The driving questions this paper seeks to address therefore include: What visions of justice do place-based organisations articulate in their strategies? Whose needs and interests do place-based organisations in neighbourhoods with high levels of cross-border migrants represent? How do city authorities perceive these different organisations?

Tatiana Thieme (University of Cambridge)

Abstract

Conceptualizations of small-scale, self-employed work in low-income urban economies tend to offer apolitical, individualistic notions of entrepreneurship and focus especially on the enabling factors for (albeit frugal) innovation. The talk will offer an alternative interpretation of self-employed work amongst the urban poor by examining the narratives of youth living in Nairobi slums whose everyday social and economic practices are associated with “hustling.”

In this talk, three particular scenarios in which “hustling” takes place will be examined: Youth in the largest slum of East Africa, Kibera, who become the spokespeople for the urban poor to international NGOs and development donors and refer to NGO workshops as “feeding programs” where a free lunch and day’s wage is given in exchange for attendance and “participation”; Youth in Huruma who establish opportunistic alliances with their constituency’s MP, serving as grassroots political campaigners in exchange for one-off hardware ‘gifts’ such as water tanks or public toilets to manage and use for income generation activities; and youth across the city’s slum communities engaged in Taka ni pato (trash is cash) work responding critically to the absence of municipal basic services and lack of employment opportunities through the under-utilized resource of waste. Mapping across these three kinds of “hustle” is the tenuous boundary between licit and illicit work, stigmas associated with urban poverty and youth simultaneously, and temptations to engage in opportunistic crime.

Caroline Knowles (Goldsmiths)

This paper challenges dominant theories of globalisation by confronting them with the insights from a research project that followed a common, travelling, object through the translocal terrains of its biography. Beginning in the oil wells of the Middle East, and ending on a landfill site on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, the trail created by a pair of flip-flop sandals passes through five countries. Presenting one or two vignettes to illustrate parts of the trail, I suggest that the dominant notions of globalisation, as a robust network of connections through the landing places of network value, unravels when confronted with the routes created by humbler objects and the lives and landscapes they connect. Tentatively labelling this vantage point ‘globalisation along the back roads’, I suggest that globalisation is not what it seems. Through the lens of an everyday plastic object, globalisation appears, instead, to be a highly mobile, fragile, unstable, inchoate, shifting matrix of journeys, generating multiple forms of precarity in the lives and landscapes it connects.

Andy Merrifield (University of Cambridge)

Based on the forthcoming book of the same title, the talk will trace the connections between radical urban theory and political activism. From Haussmann’s use of urban planning to rid 19th-century Paris of revolution to contemporary urban disaster-zones such as downtown Detroit, Merrifield reveals how the urban experience has been profoundly shaped by class antagonism and been the battle-ground for conspiracies, revolts and social eruptions. Going beyond the work of earlier urban theorists such as Manuel Castells, Merrifield identifies the new urban question that has emerged and demands urgent attention, as the city becomes a site of active plunder by capital and the setting for new forms of urban struggle, from Occupy to the indignados.

Ariel Handel (Tel Aviv University)

Abstract

The claim that the settlements in the West Bank are gated communities might seem trivial. Those are an explicit example of a community featuring, on the one hand, social cohesion based on shared values, while, on the other hand, self-isolation with the help of fences and a stress on the “security of the community.” The argument of this paper, however, is different. The paper suggests that the settlement layout in the West Bank is not just an aggregate of 124 “legal” gated communities and a similar number of “illegal outposts,” but rather a single, contiguous gated community gating, in turn, Palestinian “islands” within it. The reading I will offer seeks to look at the space in question through a careful reading of its use values. The emphasis is put on the question of mobilities in order to show how the fortressed points turn into an exclusionary web by means of separated roads and movement restrictions. By analyzing the combined system of settlements, roads, military legislation, spatial design and applied violence, the paper shows how the few hundred points consolidate into one coherent spatial system. The paper wishes to contribute both to the spatial analysis of Israel's now 45 years-old occupation of the West Bank, to the growing study of politics of mobility, and to the discourse of gated communities by adding colonialism and violence to the mostly neo-liberal explanations of the phenomenon.

S’bu Zikode (Founder of Abahlali baseMjondolo)

Abstract

Abahlali baseMjondolo – the largest social movement in South Africa – brings together shack dwellers across the country in the struggle for a life of dignity for all. Under the South African constitution signed into law by Mandela, everyone must have access to a house, yet one in four South Africans still live in overcrowded shack settlements without even basic services. The Marikana miners’ strike highlighted how poor South Africans are still facing repression. Abahlali has also faced violence and crackdowns in their campaigns, but have continued to fight for a decent life for all and what was promised in the new South Africa.

S’bu Zikode founded Abahlali baseMjondolo in KwaZulu-Natal, his home province, in 2005 and was the first President. He founded it on a strong belief of equality for all and that governments and academics all too often speak about the poor, but not to the poor. As a leader and founder of the movement, he has faced on-going repression, including being tortured in police custody, being the target of two nights of attacks on the movement in 2009 and a number of death threats following the attacks that have forced his family to live clandestinely ever since.

S’bu Zikode’s talk will be preceded by a screening of excerpts from the film “Dear Mandela” by Dara Kell and Christopher Nizza.

Life in the Alpha Territory: London's "Super-Rich" Neighbourhoods

Professor Roger Burrows (Deptartment of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Abstract

This paper extends recent work on the 'spatialization of class' to an analysis of the territories of the 'super-rich'. Such an approach has already been drawn upon within contemporary urban studies. This includes the now massive literature on gentrification, suburban life and middle-class identities, but also questions of domestic fortification and the spatial and political secession of the very wealthy. All contain elements that offer attempts at incorporating the very affluent within their analytic purview. However, such studies have not yet fully encompassed profoundly wealthy individuals, their lifestyles, networks and their economic significance to the metropoles within which they tend to cluster. To this end, the paper begins the task of applying approaches derived from the 'spatialization of class' literature to an analysis of neighbourhoods within which such populations have come to dominate. It offers an initial exploration of the analytic application of geodemographic techniques - originating in 'commercial sociology' - to the geography of the 'super-rich'.

We use the Bourdieusian inflected Mosaic system to map out the geography of the 'Alpha Territory' in the UK.We examine four distinct geodemographic types: Global Power Brokers; Voices of Authority; Business Class; and Serious Money. Such areas are highly concentrated in central and inner London suburbs, with some outposts in the 'home counties'. We present a number of detailed maps and visualisations of the precise geography of this Alpha Territory with a particular emphasis on its propinquity to other types of neighbourhood.

We discuss some initial socio-geographic implications of the findings.

Sustaining the Life of the Polis: Pasts and Futures of Public Health Work in African Cities

Ruth Prince (Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

Dr Noemi Tousignant (Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge)

Abstract

How are publics of protection and care defined in African cities today? The effects of globalization and neoliberal policies on urban space are well-documented. From London to Sao Paolo, denationalisation, privatisation, offshoring and cuts in state expenditure are creating enclaves and exclusions, resulting in fragmented, stratified social geographies In African cities, where humanitarian/experimental and market logics dominate the distribution of sanitation and healthcare, this fragmentation is particularly stark. Privilege and crisis interrupt older contiguities, delineating spaces and times of exception and defining the ‘public’ of health by survival or consumption. Is it possible, under these conditions, to enact and imagine public health as a project of citizens, animated in civic space?

Radu Carciumaru (Lecturer, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg)

Sherrill Stroschein (Senior Lecturer in Politics, UCL)

Dr Colin McFarlane (Reader in the Department of Geography, Durham University)

Abstract

The global sanitation crisis is rapidly urbanising, but how is sanitation produced and sustained in informal settlements? While there is data available on aggregate statistics, relatively little is known about how sanitation is created, maintained, threatened and contested within informal settlements. Drawing on an ethnography of two very different informal settlements in Mumbai, this paper identifies key ways in which informal sanitation is produced, rendered vulnerable and politicised. In particular, four informal urban sanitation processes are examined: patronage, self-managed systems, solidarity and exclusion, and open defecation. The paper also considers the implications for a research agenda around informal urban sanitation, emphasising in particular the potential of a comparative ethnographic approach, and the possibilities for better sanitation conditions in Mumbai and beyond.