City & Society最新文献

Urban theorists increasingly resort to the language of multiplicity when describing cities, particularly Southeast Asian metropolises like Jakarta, Indonesia. Cities, they argue, are composed of worlds within worlds, fragments that fail to cohere into a whole. This is a useful model, but it fails to account for the felt specificity of a particular place and time. Every city has a distinct atmosphere that separates it from elsewhere and which itself cannot easily be defined. This photo essay uses a sensory medium, that is, photography, to evoke the felt atmosphere on the streets of Jakarta. It explores the potential of photography to reveal something of the feeling a place produces without reducing it to any singular set of circumstances or conditions. Photography, it demonstrates, can operate as a nonreductive mode of apprehending, a way of depicting the flurry of activity that produces worlds, without defining or confining the boundaries of those worlds.

The article examines the lasting effects of squatting in Rome by tracing how its political and pedagogical legacies persist long after eviction. While the physical removal of individuals from a space is often considered the defining moment of eviction, it is, in reality, only the culmination of a lengthy and complex social and legal process—one whose consequences continue to unfold far beyond the moment of displacement. Although squatting is often understood as politically transformative, little attention has been paid to the forms of agency it cultivates and how these endure after unhoming. Drawing on feminist and anthropological approaches, the article introduces agentic homemaking as a relational practice shaped through collective dwelling and shared political struggle. Through the life stories of two former squatters, it shows how people confront unhoming by mobilizing care, mutual aid, and learned knowledge to resist structural inequalities and rebuild their lives. The article also advances the concept of extended squatting time to highlight the enduring influence of squatting as a lived pedagogy that produces marginalized forms of knowledge central to urban politics and everyday survival. Together, these concepts foreground overlooked forms of agency that emerge in the aftermath of dispossession, offering new perspectives on urban struggle, relational resilience, and future-making.

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.