City & Society最新文献

This article explores water politics, neoliberal austerity measures, and racial capitalism in contemporary Detroit. I detail how a city campaign of mass residential water shutoffs, begun in 2014 and effecting tens of thousands of Detroit households, has served as a weapon against poor communities of color to produce economic outcomes favorable to corporate creditors and political elites. I argue that an analysis of water politics in contemporary Detroit allows for a more nuanced understanding of how neoliberal urbanism produces its own distinctive structures of racial and gendered oppression—not class domination alone. Drawing on fieldwork with city activists and other residents impacted by water terminations, this article analyzes how capitalism has relied on race to validate myriad expressions of violence, capital accumulation, and dispossession. I submit that water is a resource whose provision and denial provides a lens through which to ascertain who is and is not regarded as fully human in the context of the neoliberalization of racial capitalism. This piece also details innovative ways in which water rights activists and other Detroit residents have resisted authoritarian water policies and crafted survival strategies to persevere in the face of abiding threats to their health and human rights.

Anyone who has lived in a city knows that, separately from the administrative or electoral districts, there are districts that exist in the imagination. Areas of the city seem to have a distinctive character and ethos. The article suggests that such notional place-forming occurs spontaneously through everyday sensations, life activities, and events and is spontaneously evaluative and comparative. In these ways, a notion of “intuitive district” differs from externally given analytical concepts commonly used in the literature to categorize urban divisions, such as neighborhood or quartier. Intuitive districts are subjective but also widely shared in urban communications. The article argues that they have an objective agency: They influence people's decisions, what they care about, how they move around the city, and interact (or do not interact) with other residents. Using the example of one post-socialist city in Russia (Ulan-Ude), the article explores how intuitive directs have formed and shows how their existence can have effect on highly diverse urban processes and actions, from the formation of gangland territories to house prices, from religious intensification to providing the foundation for public protest.

This article examines how urban temporalities have come to alternately foster and hinder migrants' incorporation into the larger social body. It draws on ethnographic and archival research conducted in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, and focuses on the so-called “migrant crisis” of 2015, which resonated with earlier migration histories in the region. When Eisenhüttenstadt was founded in 1950, nearly one-third of its residents were naturalized East German citizens. Yet under the socialist regime, any acknowledgment of their migration background was expressly forbidden and perceived as a threat to Eastern Bloc geopolitical alliances. Around 2015, however, this history reemerged, first at the local cultural history museum and later, in public discourse. This article attends to the shifting positionality of migration histories within the context of the former East Germany, which was perceived as European in a global context but post-socialist in a German context. In doing so, it reveals how tensions between individual and urban futurities influence solidarity, integration, and national belonging.

This special issue departs from the premise that the sensible dimensions of urban (in)security shape lived and embodied experiences of the city in ways that reflect and affect social and spatial forms of control, belonging, and inequality. As visceral as they may seem, we also contend that these sensorial registers of (in)security are far from given: they are learned and taught, whether consciously, or otherwise. Drawing on ideas of enskilment and apprenticeship, the articles that make up this thematic collection engage the sensorial attunement of urban dwellers to how risk and safety look and feel in a diverse set of cities. Rather than an end, this approach is a means to deepen our understanding of how processual, everyday geographies of inequality are reproduced in practices and imaginaries of urban security.

Drawing on public–private circuits for urban surveillance in Recife, Brazil, this article unpacks how camera operators and ordinary residents are sensorially attuned to what constitutes a threat to urban order, from the perspective of state security governance. Through the notion of sensory enskilment, the piece delves into how surveillant civilians learn to distinguish such threats in digitally mediated urban sightings. By attending to the development of scopic skills in everyday surveillance contexts, I shed light on how security events become visible and legible across communities of practice, contributing to the formation of policing subjectivities and the maintenance of broader regimes of vigilance. The analysis draws on qualitative research on two sets of sites that cultivate civilians' visual skills around urban security: video-surveillance control rooms managed by the security secretariats of Recife and Pernambuco, and WhatsApp groups dedicated to the policing of specific territories. This article seeks to deepen recent debates on how vertical and lateral forms of surveillance shape political communities and sociospatial divides.

Focusing on human–dog relations, this article develops a more-than-human approach to the sensing of urban insecurity. Extending work on the embodied, sensory dimension of fear and other security affects, it centers the role of non-human, canine bodies in processes of risk assessment. Drawing on research in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how a range of city dwellers learn to sense danger with and through security dogs. How do those who live and work in the city construct and experience its threats through attunement to their dogs' olfactory, auditory, and visual acuity? And how does this interspecies sensing of urban danger co-produce distributions of urban safety and precarity? In this context, I suggest, dogs are not only a companion species but also a “prosthetic species,” animals that enhance and extend the limits of the human senses, enabling a more-than-human knowledge of what threats look, sound, and smell like. I discuss such practices of interspecies sensing and their effects, concentrating on the identification of criminal, political, and spiritual forms of danger. Together, such instances of interspecies sensing can provide new insights into the everyday perception, construction, and negotiation of fearful cityscapes.