City & Society最新文献

In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling (“greywater”) systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city’s water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city’s water grid. Elaborating the longstanding frictions over greywater reuse in LA reveals how these fixtures are mobilized by advocates to rescript the roles of both individuals and the state within the urban waterscape. Detailing public agency workers’ resistance to this form of selective disconnection from the grid helps to clarify the patterns of flows, norms of consumption, and forms of state control at stake in efforts to decentralize arrangements of urban water management.

The migrant families who build India’s cities do so to meet practical and ritual aspirations rooted in the village, undergoing spatial and temporal fragmentation to maintain rural longevity and the possibilities of ritual time. This article contributes an alternative position to linear-framed presumptions of migration and urbanity, illustrating instead how everyday experiences of dislocation can be productive through labor, timespace, and imagination; bridging the gulf between residence on urban construction sites in Bengaluru, southern India, and desired village homes. However, lived experiences of dislocation remain stratified by gender and class, leading to highly conjugated experiences of precarity, mobility, and possibility. Despite the urban ambivalence felt by women and girls as a result, a shared experience of dislocation enables entire families to undertake the grueling yet regenerative work of circular migration, ensuring the continuation and renewal of village life and ritual time through its incompleteness.

This article investigates parent advocacy in the child welfare system amongst families living in low-income and racialized urban areas, those most impacted by this system. Drawing from my fieldwork experience at the community-based organization Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in East Harlem, New York, I interrogate the political trajectory of the organization, its practices, and its purpose. I analyze how the decision parents make to advocate is tied to the injustice, stigma, and surveillance they—and especially mothers—experience in the child welfare system. While exploring how parenting and its political dimension are reshaped for disfranchised mothers through advocacy, I describe the “fine line” between compliance and resistance that CWOP has walked throughout its history to preserve its existence. This article illustrates how this form of activism takes place within a fragmented and increasingly privatized welfare regime, in which community-based organizations struggle for their right to remain political actors and not be overtaken by the logic of service provision. Through my analysis, I aim to contribute to anthropological understandings of the forms of political agency taken up by stigmatized subjects in their interactions with the state, and the limits the state demonstrates in “hearing” their claims and requests for change.

In the 2010s, a new phenomenon was spotted in the Seoul Metro. K-pop fans began adorning subway stations with large ads congratulating their heroes—so-called K-pop idols—on their birthdays and other anniversaries. Not only have these fandom-produced ads transformed the visual landscape of the Seoul Metro, they also invited novel spatial practices when fans, primarily young women, toured the ads to take photographs of and with them. Based on ethnographic observations, this article explores how fandom ads and fans visiting them make the Seoul Metro social and public in new ways. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, the article frames fans’ ads themselves and engagements they invite as assertions of the “right to the city,” and relates them to spatial interventions that reclaim urban spaces based on symbolic—not legal—ownership, such as murals and graffiti. The article argues that K-pop idol ads recapture the Seoul Metro from domination by commercial advertisers’ interests and appropriate it as a space of fandom, particularly female fandom. It also contends that this reorganization of space carries implications for a broader reclamation of subway surfaces as urban resources.

In Latin America’s pink tide democracies, peripheries were pivotal openings into the ambiguities of political and economic urban governance. Once portrayed as territories of decay, state disregard, and societal oblivion, peripheries turned into key moral and spatial assemblages in Brazil’s post-neoliberal project of a “de-poored,” middle-class country. This article draws on ethnographic research conducted in two peripheral Minha Casa Minha Vida projects—Brazil’s large-scale public housing program—in the city of Porto Alegre. Charting the long-term entanglements of local activism, communal hope, and national developmentalism, I argue that peripheral zones illuminate the ambivalences of state- and place-making. Unveiling the politics of differentiation and distended governance that render one periphery a successful case of state and market intervention over the other, I explore how images of the “model periphery” are enforced through local infrastructures of worth and the effacement of its failed Other: the intractable faraway periphery, deemed to disappear in the name of public accountability and social and economic development. In conclusion, the article suggests that the consorted travails of leaders, citizen activists, politicians, and planners in casting visibility onto the model periphery contribute to bolstering and obscuring extant patterns of urban segregation and social inequality.