City & Society最新文献

Since 2017, social housing activists from the Reclaim the City movement have occupied and repaired a formerly abandoned, apartheid-era hospital in Woodstock, one of Cape Town's rapidly gentrifying central neighborhoods. In the face of recurring threats of mass eviction and a lack of affordable, well-located social housing alternatives, it has become Cape Town's most prominent and politically contested building occupation. This article focuses on a co-design initiative that has emerged from within the occupation, in collaboration with allied community architects and civil society facilitators. In the article, I argue that the initiative added another negotiating tool and layer of resistance for creatively opposing vilification, discrimination, and displacement. Foregrounding the initiative's co-designed architectural models, collective imaginaries, and operative scales, the article critically interrogates how the movement's co-design initiative complemented ongoing repair practices, and how and whether these complementary activist repertoires could create viable avenues for improved living conditions within this politically hard-won activist space. The article contributes to urban anthropological research on architecture, design, and movement practices aimed at the broader goal of rebuilding and repairing existing communities in the context of Cape Town's historically most divided socio-spatial segregation. Throughout the article, I discuss “design” and “repair” as urban political sensibilities, distinct yet connected modalities of creative resistance, that operated as complementary tactics in defense of the occupation.

This article situates fitness spaces in Kampala, Uganda as sites of an emergent form of urban relationality, what I term “renegade relationality.” Renegade relationality is transgressive in that it creates both discursive and material relationships that challenge existing social and economic practices. This article charts a series of ethnographic examples of renegade relationality that illustrate its transgressive potential, including new forms of public debate, female-support networks, and networks of redistribution. Key to the transgressive nature of renegade relationality is the formation of fitness spaces as sites of social exception. The social obligations and norms that mediate sociality in other urban spaces are often temporarily suspended within fitness spaces. I locate the formation of fitness spaces as sites of social exception as part of the fitness industry's co-constitution with convergent neoliberal processes in Kampala. Tracing the ways that fitness is implicated in both neoliberal processes of urbanization as well as new discursive registers of self-responsibility suggests that renegade relationality exists not just in spite of neoliberalism, but because of it. In this way, I offer renegade relationality as an unexpected urban excess of neoliberalism, one that might draw attention to the transgressive and even progressive byproducts of the neoliberal era.

Through examining the changing landscapes brought about by a new light rail system and a concurrent railway underground project in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, this article explores how transport infrastructures layer onto one another and intersect with daily life to reframe a city symbolically and materially. It focuses on the moment of intense transformation and discussions during the light rail's final construction stage to interrogate how it engenders perceptions of the city and generates ideas of and aspirations for the urban future. It underscores the way existing threads of modernity embedded in infrastructure and urban space are rearticulated to foster visions of urban modernity.

My article explores how air-conditioning helps a private rental market emerge within state-constructed housing in Singapore, along with new forms of bodily discipline and expectations around privacy. While cross breezes had often been necessary to cool HDB apartments, the proliferation of air-conditioning since the 1990s has limited the need for cross breezes and allowed apartment owners to rent out individual bedrooms. This transformation created a class of small-scale landlords operating on thin profit margins who often depend on minimizing costs for their own financial stability. I examine how live-in landlords monitor and limit their tenants' use of air-conditioning to minimize electricity bills, producing a daily time discipline that takes agency and discretionary power away from tenants over their own living space. Nevertheless, air-conditioning as a technical assemblage also shapes the landlord-tenant relationship, presenting affordances for tenants to hinder the landlord's surveillance, or for landlords to limit the tenants' ability to challenge their claims. I show how tenants can use these affordances to reclaim some discretionary power over their own living spaces.