City & Society最新文献

In this article, I take the organization of universal COVID testing as a point of departure for understanding the lived experiences of China's zero-COVID policy and look at “the Community” (shequ) as a dynamic interface between the state and urban residents during the liminal time of a global pandemic. Drawing on Bryant and Knight's notion of “vernacular timespace” (2019), I analyze the timespace of zero-COVID as a state-regulated future orientation interwoven with collective anticipation of crisis, bureaucratic temporal governance, and contestations over time as a form of agency in everyday life. Instead of assuming a unitary form of present-future relationship that was homogeneous and unchallenged, I argue that the collective anticipation of a public health crisis was constantly shaped, managed, and contested throughout the processes of pandemic community building. This research hopes to enrich reflections on the interplays of time, power, and legitimacy in post-pandemic urban governance.

This article is about green capitalism, demolition, and the production of housing scarcity in Kigali, Rwanda. It follows Kiyovu cy'abakene—a real place that was near zero-carbon, built with renewable resources, owned and operated by Kigali residents—as it was first reimagined as a rhetorical “slum” and then converted into an actual one by force. And it follows the design and construction of Batsinda Housing estate, a sustainable solution to a fictional “crisis” of inadequate housing in Kigali. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, I argue that in Kigali, and many cities like it, the destruction of built environments is not only about local elites who wish to demolish “slums” or “informal settlements” to build “world-class” luxury cities. The demolition of neighborhoods and the displacement of people who live there is also done in the service of making new markets for green commodities through the production of scarcity. To manufacture effective demand for green commodities while maintaining their monopoly over what constitutes “sustainable,” Kigali's international teams of managers and consultants must render alternative, ecologically sound, African-owned neighborhoods and building technologies “unsustainable.”

I want to express my gratitude to Caroline Parker, Jeffrey Martin, Michael Farquhar, and Stefano Portelli for taking the time to read and engage with my work. Their thought-provoking comments will stay with me as I continue to write and reflect on topics related to the anthropology of policing, the ethical and methodological challenges posed by police ethnographies, world-building and abolitionist practices among the oppressed, and the role of the spectral in resistance. I am delighted to learn that my analysis of policing and resistance resonates with urban contexts in Latin America, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. Although there is growing literature on the global nature of policing (Bradford et al., 2016; Go, 2023; Machold, 2024; Schrader, 2019), I believe there is a need for comprehensive global comparative ethnographies that explore both policing and abolitionist practices. I sincerely hope that Police, Provocation, Politics will contribute to fostering a comparative anthropological dialogue on policing which is not limited to the police institution and on world-building resistance practices rooted in long histories of defiance across both the Global North and South. In this limited space, I will concentrate on three key points highlighted by the reviewers in their insightful questions and comments: (a) the methodological implications of decentring the police as ethnographic protagonists; (b) the potentials and limitations of the Rancièrian perspective in anthropological approaches to policing; and (c) the martyr and the political theology of resistance.

Armenian Apostolic Christians in Istanbul implicitly assert their “right to the city” through the liturgical itinerary that moves around the megalopolis of Istanbul. Though the right to the city has been taken up in a plethora of ways, its applicability to religion and religious practices is underexplored. While many Armenians in the Republic of Turkey explicitly take up the language of rights, the urban liturgical movements described in this article do not sit easily with either ideas of universal human rights or the minority rights framework operative in the Republic of Turkey. The concept of the right to the city, which already sits at the limits of conventional notions of rights, helps articulate how these religious practices claim an urban minority presence. By considering Armenian Christian liturgical practice in Istanbul simultaneously as “stational liturgy” and as a claim to the “right to the city,” this article offers an ethnographic account of urban minority presence-making that encounters the legal strictures of rights discourse without being fully enmeshed in them. In so doing, the article uses the ethnography to make a broader argument about the limits of rights discourse to account fully for forms of presence-making that are grounded in minority traditions.

The prevalence of neoliberalism has produced varied effects on cities ranging from rapid growth to gradual disempowerment. Instead of considering neoliberal urbanization as a fixed, predetermined process, I discuss the possibility of leapfrogging in urban repositioning. Particularly, I examine Eskişehir's repositioning process in response to disempowerment, placing particular emphasis on the “spatial fix.” Rather than being passive recipients of neoliberalization, local ruling elites might develop political agency to not only counter but also capitalize on disempowerment. To overcome financial and political constraints vital for the spatial fix, Eskişehir's mayor leveraged multiscalar networking strategies and symbolic revitalizations at particular historical conjunctures. Accordingly, Eskişehir's municipality, ruled by the center-left opposition party, sought to redefine the city as a stronghold of secularism with the claims of Europeanization and modernization. They introduced the “Eskişehir model” as a contrasting narrative to the ruling AKP's urban vision rooted in Islamist-nationalist agenda. These mechanisms reveal that ideological-political clashes at the national level can serve as windows of opportunity for local ruling elites to counter disempowerment. As the ethnographic research shows, these mechanisms had leapfrogging effects not only on repositioning and fostering political power but also dissembling existing inequalities, disparities, and segregation beneath the celebrated Eskişehir model.