Right to toilets? infra-bio-urbanism over human waste, memories, and housing inequality

IF 4.6 1区社会学 Q1 ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space Pub Date : 2023-05-22 DOI:10.1177/0308518x231166953

Shu-Mei Huang, Lijin Yao

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Abstract

This research attends to how urban tenants bring matong (toilets in the form of urine buckets)—which are a material, semiotic, and marketable piece of infrastructure—into the debates over the remaking of a heritage district in Hongkou, Shanghai. Challenges abound for the site, which is occupied by prewar buildings where Jewish refugees found shelter during the war and more than 10 thousand Chinese tenants moved in after the Jews left. Until 2020, the dilapidated buildings accommodated an aging population of tenants who wish to stay relevant to the redevelopment vision of Shanghai and a variety of community business, including urban waste recycling. To find a crack in the state-led, neoliberal system, the tenants managed to exercise infrapolitics—an everyday form of resistance—over an urban infrastructure that is of particular significance to their bio-well-being and beyond. We analyze a set of spatial politics on sanatory infrastructure in Hongkou to understand how the tenants are desperately capitalizing on their disadvantages and reassembling memories, waste, and housing inequality into something more promising from below. The theorization of infra-bio-urbanism upon toilets sheds light on the accumulating anxiety upon housing inequality and infrastructural mobility in globalizing cities in China and beyond.

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对上厕所吗?基于人类排泄物、记忆和住房不平等的次生物城市化

本研究关注的是城市租户如何将马通(尿桶形式的厕所)——这是一种物质、符号和可销售的基础设施——带入上海虹口遗产区改造的争论。这里面临着许多挑战，战前的建筑占据着这里，在战争期间，犹太难民在这里找到了避难所，在犹太人离开后，超过1万名中国租户搬进了这里。到2020年，这些破旧的建筑容纳了越来越多的租户，他们希望与上海的重建愿景和各种社区业务保持联系，包括城市废物回收。为了在国家主导的新自由主义体系中找到裂缝，租户们设法运用基础设施政治——一种日常形式的抵抗——来控制城市基础设施，而城市基础设施对他们的生物福祉和其他方面都具有特别重要的意义。我们分析了虹口卫生基础设施的一系列空间政治，以了解租户如何绝望地利用他们的劣势，并将记忆、浪费和住房不平等重新组合为更有希望的东西。基于厕所的次生物城市化理论揭示了中国及其他地区全球化城市中对住房不平等和基础设施流动性日益积累的焦虑。

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来源期刊

Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space Multiple-

CiteScore

9.50

自引率

9.50%

发文量

100

期刊介绍： Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space is a pluralist and heterodox journal of economic research, principally concerned with questions of urban and regional restructuring, globalization, inequality, and uneven development. International in outlook and interdisciplinary in spirit, the journal is positioned at the forefront of theoretical and methodological innovation, welcoming substantive and empirical contributions that probe and problematize significant issues of economic, social, and political concern, especially where these advance new approaches. The horizons of Economy and Space are wide, but themes of recurrent concern for the journal include: global production and consumption networks; urban policy and politics; race, gender, and class; economies of technology, information and knowledge; money, banking, and finance; migration and mobility; resource production and distribution; and land, housing, labor, and commodity markets. To these ends, Economy and Space values a diverse array of theories, methods, and approaches, especially where these engage with research traditions, evolving debates, and new directions in urban and regional studies, in human geography, and in allied fields such as socioeconomics and the various traditions of political economy.

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