City Seminar

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.

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.

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.

David Pinder (Lecturer in Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London) Abstract Cities are profoundly mobile. Yet they are also in many ways fixed, solid and enduring. Movement and flow typically require fixed infrastructures to enable them, while processes of deterritorialisation are accompanied by those of reterritorialisation. This presentation addresses the long-standing tension in urban writings between movement and settlement, and between flow and fixity, by addressing attempts to re-imagine and re-conceptualise urban mobilities through contested visions of circulation. The focus is on selected architectural and urban projects developed within modernist and avant-garde circles, especially in western Europe during the 1960s. What might be made of experimental designs and proposals for cities to become mobile and nomadic themselves? How to approach these visions today, at a time when mobilities and nomad thought are high on urban agendas? How might reconsidering them enable insights into the politics of mobility, and hence into debates about possible mobility futures? David Pinder is Reader in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. His research focuses on utopianism and cities, with particular reference to modernist and avant-garde movements in twentieth-century Europe; and on art, spatial practices and urban politics. He is author of Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (2005) and guest editor of a theme issue of Cultural Geographies on ‘Arts of urban exploration’ (2005). He was a Velux Visiting Professor at Roskilde University, Denmark, in 2011-12.