City & Society最新文献

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.

What is the place of the wind in analyses of the city? In late 2016, and into 2017, forceful dry season winds in Gulu, Uganda, provoked frequent commentary. This short ethnographic essay endeavors to think with these winds (of weather and breath) and to speculate their implications for “the city” vis-à-vis its lived, sensory geographies. Using listening methodologies drawn from ethnography, sonic praxis, and Black studies, I consider windy encounters as gatherings of the city in audible movements of air. From these windy attunements emerges a city unsettled by changing seasonal winds, a city that endures, and a city living with wind as relational presence. For each, performed displacements of air enact wind as a situating force amidst unsteady linkages of geography, climate, and urban development. Can winds attune us to ways of unsettling human geographies of enclosure?

When the Syrian Civil War led to the depopulation of the Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp in Damascus, members of the camp's Palestinian refugee community suddenly found themselves facing further rounds of enforced movement. Prompted by this renewed displacement, this article explores how, following a rupture with place, refugees build attachments to new places of refuge and considers what happens when such a rupture is not a single event in the past but an ongoing and repeated process. Drawing on ethnographic research with former Yarmouk residents living in Lebanon, Jordan, Europe, and the United States, I argue that attachments to place emerge through material and immaterial accumulations that arise amid refugees' necessary daily practices of dwelling—a process I term accumulating place. That is, the need to get by in new places requires the accumulation of identity documents, permits, apartments, furnishings, languages, social ties, and beyond. It is through these varied accumulations that attachments to new places of refuge emerge. In exploring the experiences of Yarmouk's former residents, I situate these refugees' contemporary accumulations within the broader history of Palestinian displacement, demonstrating that, for iteratively displaced refugees, attachments to place include but expand beyond the binary of homeland and host country.

Indigenous communities in urban environments experience unique and enduring forms of colonialism. In the city of Bogota, Colombia, the Indigenous Muysca community of Suba experiences urban coloniality through various mechanisms such as displacement, environmental degradation, and epistemicide. Despite having their traditional territories abruptly urbanized, the Muysca engage in embodied practices of contestation through language revitalization, urban gardening, and the occupation of sacred places that have become urbanized. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Muysca of Suba framed within the Participatory Action Research methodology, I explore dwelling as an embodied, everyday experience rooted in place to illuminate the processes through which the Muysca interact with their environment to produce alternative socioecological lifeworlds in the city. These alternative ways of relating to the environment, which I refer to as Muysca dwelling, challenge the logic of the urban coloniality of nature that continues to drive Indigenous dispossession through urban development. By highlighting how the Muysca's embodied practices of dwelling unsettle technologies of urban coloniality of nature, I demonstrate how urban Indigenous temporalities and ontologies are cultivated within the city and reflect alternative processes of Indigenous revitalization and socioecological relations.

Building on an anthropology of the city, this special section aims to further pry open “the city” by tarrying with the material and sensorial relationships that accrue between cities and their residents even while hanging in suspension/motion. Through these concerns with the material and the sensorial, we contribute to the emergent anthropological conversation about the ways in which the felt textures of place matter to the city, atmospherically, temporally, affectively, and infrastructurally. In attending to city-as-relation, we wish also to interrogate “the city” for the ways it continues to be undergirded by modernity as a colonial, racialized project and how its contemporary formations are everyday saturated with the afterlives of this past. Papers in this special section foreground the practices through which residents relate to the city while living through interplays of fixity and flux, suffusions of toxicity and joy, dispersals of memory and sense, and accumulations of labor and infrastructure. The section draws together scholars experimenting with writing craft/form as well as with uncertain modes of ethnographic attunement. They call attention to the multiple ways in which the city unsettles and is unsettled physically and conceptually by sedimentations of place.