City & Society最新文献

I want to express my sincere thanks to the Critical Urban Anthropology Association, the prize committee, and everyone involved in the selection process. Being awarded this prize is truly an honor, and I am deeply humbled to join the list of brilliant and inspiring scholars who have been recipients of this award in the past.

Police, Provocation, Politics was originated from a sense of responsibility to illustrate the extent of police violence and surveillance experienced by Istanbul's racialized Kurdish and Alevi working classes. These communities, who refer to their neighborhoods as the “Gazas of Istanbul,” are among the main constituents of leftwing and anti-colonial dissent in Turkey. But during my ethnographic research in these neighborhoods, I realized that visible forms of police violence and repression are just the tip of the iceberg, and that police violence and surveillance operate in remarkably complex, subtle, and at times counterintuitive ways. What prompted me to extend my research beyond the more apparent forms of police violence was the puzzling coexistence since the mid-2000s in these neighborhoods of intense police surveillance and militarized spatial control alongside armed and masked revolutionary vigilantism and gang activities. As an important body of critical urban anthropology literature shows, for many decades now, militarized police and drug gangs have been intrinsic to urban spaces inhabited by racialized and dispossessed communities, both in the Global North and South. In the context of these Istanbul neighborhoods, however, the presence of masked and armed revolutionary vigilantes, who fight both against the police and gangs, adds another layer of complexity to the situation. My sense of puzzlement intensified when I found out that unarmed revolutionary youths who were working to end drug dealing and gang violence in their neighborhoods through a series of public, collaborative, and peaceful activities were all selectively targeted by the anti-terror laws and put behind the bars as terrorist convicts.

In Police, Provocation, Politics, I argue that this seemingly paradoxical and long-enduring coexistence of militarized police, gangs, and armed revolutionary vigilantes in these urban spaces can only be understood within the context of policing and counterinsurgency strategies that are informed by the colonial school of warfare and Cold-War/decolonial era counterinsurgencies. These strategies, which continue to inform contemporary urban policing, have worked not merely to violently repress dissent but also to refashion the existing or emerging forms of dissent against the state. Combining archival work and oral history narratives with more than 4 years of urban ethnography and illustrating how global counterinsurgencies (such as British counterinsurgencies in Malaya and Northern Ireland, the French counterinsurgency in Algeria, and US counterinsurgencies at home and abroad) travel across time a

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.

In this article, I address how discernments of alterity as insecurity are intimately connected to bodily perceptions and cultural elaborations of heat. Focusing on the interplay of temperature and danger, I look at the role of thermoception—as sensation, as ambient quality, as idiom, and as technology—in experiences and retellings of (in)security. These are themes I explore in relation to and beyond Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), an intensive practical course that prepares expats, journalists, NGO workers, and other professionals for their travels to areas deemed unsafe. In the course, participants are taught to tap into their embodied sensations and to acquire the sensory skills to identify, avoid, and mitigate danger. Using hotness as gateway into the relation between sensory enskilment and security, this article contributes to literature concerned with the somatechnics of difference: the learnt corporeal, atmospheric, and immaterial forces that structure how we articulate Otherness and/as danger. In so doing, it unpacks how the senses, and thermoception more specifically, contribute to the production and governance of landscapes of insecurity.

Asian cities are the setting of a vast agglomeration of transportation devices and services. These means of transport are inseparable from distinct concepts and images of the city. Interventions into modes of urban transport are inspired by visions for the future of urban life and quotidian practices of traversing urban space foster particular experiences that produce distinct ideas about the city. This special issue takes the multiplicity of mobility practices in Asian cities as a point of departure to interrogate connections between embodied experiences and collective representations. Drawing on three bodies of literature that deal with the topics of urban imaginaries, infrastructures as well as the body and the city, this introduction provides a theoretical framework for the study of connections between perception and conception of cities that informs the contributions to this special issue. It sets the stage for a set of three interconnected questions that guide the contributions: How do people affectively engage with urban spaces through practices of bodily movement? How are these practices of movement related to and generative of specific ideas and representations of the city? How do these practices of movement transform, challenge, subvert, or conform to dominant ideas and representations of the city?

Immigrants play a crucial role in the development of capital-intensive, industrialized agriculture and often find themselves living in derelict, stigmatized neighborhoods where they become not only objects of fear and exclusion but also objects of racketeering, exploitation, and profit-making dynamics. Global trends and migration flows trigger new concerns among policymakers who realize that food production is not only a rural issue. Discussing the Italian case of the Saluzzo Fruit District and the Prima Accoglienza Stagionali (PAS, First Reception of Seasonal Workers) project, this contribution focuses on the role that cities as institutional complexes can have in preventing illegal recruitment and exploitation of labor in agriculture as well as improving the living conditions of migrant field hands through the activation of urban–rural synergies for multifactor and multilevel cooperation. Results offer an overview of the potentiality of the abandonment of an emergency approach limited to the sole provision of shelters to migrant workers for adopting a more structured and holistic approach to territorial planning.

This paper analyzes the connections between real estate speculation and authoritarian populism in El Salvador. Focusing on president Nayib Bukele's term as mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán (2012–2015), I examine the role speculative urbanism played in the crafting of his profile as a promising politician in the early years of his career. I trace how Bukele instrumentalized the ecosystem of Nuevo Cuscatlán's coffee forest as a means to fund a personalistic populist strategy whose main project called for the construction of a “New City.” This project involved the lifting of barriers to real estate investment to raise funds for social programs and municipal infrastructure. Its flipside was an aggressive process of deforestation and displacement of rural populations. Drawing on urban political ecology and critical agrarian studies, I argue that Bukele's New City project constituted a type of urban spectacle. This urban spectacle was rooted in two socio-ecological dynamics: (1) The use of land as a revenue-raising token of exchange; and (2) The fetishization of urban water infrastructure in the context of water scarcity. The paper concludes with various considerations about the destructive force of the link between authoritarian populism and urban extractivism in rural environments.

“Reciprocal spaces,” such as windows and balconies, connect the vertical and the horizontal, enable the flow of meanings and feelings, and join with other material artifacts to unite emotionally and socially those who are spatially distant, and socially and emotionally distance those who are spatially proximate. Cairo's balconies reveal that reciprocal spaces allow the gaze to be reoriented, the meaning to be circulated, and the feeling to be shared. They blur the distinction between the subject and the object, the observer and the observed, and the high and the low. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Cairo and informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Karen Barad, this paper shows that the balcony is entangled with other objects, spaces, and people in ways that materialize the socio-economic hierarchies (especially class and gender), which structure daily practices and constitute urban subjects. Incorporating balconies in ethnographic research, this paper argues, enables us to be in the city while thinking of the city, undermining a dichotomy that has long troubled urban anthropology.

In this article, I employ the notion of sensory enskilment to investigate the embodied relations through which White Dutch middle-class residents of the Indische Buurt, a rapidly gentrifying multicultural neighborhood in the east of Amsterdam, learn to tune in to sensory nuisance to discern safe and unsafe bodies and places in their surroundings. The analysis involves examining those institutional and interactional avenues of (unwitting) sensory learning through which habituated perceptual patterns of stigmatization that conflate the everyday sensory order of Moroccan-Dutch youths with feelings of urban insecurity are cultivated, produced, and consolidated. Studying the ways in which sensory knowledge is implicated in the reproduction of socioeconomic exclusions in contested urban territories can shed new light on discussions around urban sensory politics and draw attention to the enrolment of the senses in revanchist urban renewal.