City & Society最新文献

This paper examines the intersection of city life and mental health in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews and focus group discussions, it explores how urban precarity, infrastructural violence, and uncertainty in a rapidly shifting world contribute to mental distress. The findings highlight that urban precarity, passive infrastructural violence, and individual identity—encompassing personality, available opportunities, navigation of these opportunities based on qualifications and support, and perceptions by others—are central to processes leading to mental unease or breakdown. By emphasizing local perspectives, this paper underscores the importance of understanding the unique links between urban living and mental health in African cities. It advocates for a multidisciplinary approach that bridges global frameworks with the sociopolitical and infrastructural realities of urban Africa, offering fresh insights into the mental health challenges faced by those living on the margins of what Peter Sloterdijk has called the Palais de cristal.

Nairobi is a rapidly changing city. The speed, magnitude, and unpredictability of the change are productive of a kind of unsettling. This unsettling is felt in the sound of drilling, the texture of the constant dust, the sight of cranes, and the unevenness of uplifted sidewalks. At the same time, as the sound, dust, and cranes persist across the city from day into night from 1 year to the next, this change is also productive of a kind of sedimentation, a resettling of the unsettling, a certainty of uncertainty and upheaval. How can we understand the processes of simultaneous rapid change and waiting taking place in Nairobi, and what are ways of thinking about the temporality of these processes? I posit an analytic of repeated fits and starts whose speed or lack of speed unsettles. In addition, I posit the temporal concept of sedimentation, or the accumulation of destruction/construction layered on top of each other, producing a repetitive pattern of rushing followed by waiting. As such, Nairobi, I argue, is constituted as much by unsettling as it is by sedimentation.

How did urban residents use noise to stage digital protests during the pandemic? This article focuses on online “cacerolazos,” noise demonstrations by New York City housing organizers and tenants demanding rent cancellation during spring 2020. I analyze rent cancellation cacerolazos as assemblages of sonic and digital practices that enabled tenants to narrativize and contest economic conditions and to build solidarity during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cacerolazos were conducted primarily on online platforms due to health concerns and limitations for public gatherings implemented by state officials. Participants used noisemaking to demand renter protections, foster community, and call attention to precarious housing. By analyzing digital archival and ethnographic data, I examine how the affordances of virtual space differently enabled and constrained the recognition and uptake of cacerolazos as a protest form in the United States. I also situate pandemic-era cacerolazos within longer, interrelated genealogies of Latin American protest and dissensual noisemaking projects conducted on the internet. The cacerolazos' limited reach in early pandemic politics emblematized existing racial and economic inequalities that sedimented during the unfolding crisis in the city.

In this article, I take the organization of universal COVID testing as a point of departure for understanding the lived experiences of China's zero-COVID policy and look at “the Community” (shequ) as a dynamic interface between the state and urban residents during the liminal time of a global pandemic. Drawing on Bryant and Knight's notion of “vernacular timespace” (2019), I analyze the timespace of zero-COVID as a state-regulated future orientation interwoven with collective anticipation of crisis, bureaucratic temporal governance, and contestations over time as a form of agency in everyday life. Instead of assuming a unitary form of present-future relationship that was homogeneous and unchallenged, I argue that the collective anticipation of a public health crisis was constantly shaped, managed, and contested throughout the processes of pandemic community building. This research hopes to enrich reflections on the interplays of time, power, and legitimacy in post-pandemic urban governance.

In February of 1978, heavy rain brought major flooding to the Los Angeles region. Attention quickly turned to the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, which had activated its cloud seeding program just prior to the storm. This event provides a focal point for examining ways in which the physicality of clouds informs an elemental approach to urbanism that is at once epistemological and material. Suspended vapor or ice crystals that might precipitate or disperse, clouds offer an understanding of ways of being and knowing in motion. The materiality of water, wind, mud, and concrete in Los Angeles comes to matter in ways inflected by that of clouds. Like clouds, these are moving, phase-shifting forms of matter that destabilize and elude modes of classification. As a material form for thinking through phase shifting processes more generally, clouds attune us toward an unsettled city.

This article is about green capitalism, demolition, and the production of housing scarcity in Kigali, Rwanda. It follows Kiyovu cy'abakene—a real place that was near zero-carbon, built with renewable resources, owned and operated by Kigali residents—as it was first reimagined as a rhetorical “slum” and then converted into an actual one by force. And it follows the design and construction of Batsinda Housing estate, a sustainable solution to a fictional “crisis” of inadequate housing in Kigali. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, I argue that in Kigali, and many cities like it, the destruction of built environments is not only about local elites who wish to demolish “slums” or “informal settlements” to build “world-class” luxury cities. The demolition of neighborhoods and the displacement of people who live there is also done in the service of making new markets for green commodities through the production of scarcity. To manufacture effective demand for green commodities while maintaining their monopoly over what constitutes “sustainable,” Kigali's international teams of managers and consultants must render alternative, ecologically sound, African-owned neighborhoods and building technologies “unsustainable.”

I want to express my gratitude to Caroline Parker, Jeffrey Martin, Michael Farquhar, and Stefano Portelli for taking the time to read and engage with my work. Their thought-provoking comments will stay with me as I continue to write and reflect on topics related to the anthropology of policing, the ethical and methodological challenges posed by police ethnographies, world-building and abolitionist practices among the oppressed, and the role of the spectral in resistance. I am delighted to learn that my analysis of policing and resistance resonates with urban contexts in Latin America, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. Although there is growing literature on the global nature of policing (Bradford et al., 2016; Go, 2023; Machold, 2024; Schrader, 2019), I believe there is a need for comprehensive global comparative ethnographies that explore both policing and abolitionist practices. I sincerely hope that Police, Provocation, Politics will contribute to fostering a comparative anthropological dialogue on policing which is not limited to the police institution and on world-building resistance practices rooted in long histories of defiance across both the Global North and South. In this limited space, I will concentrate on three key points highlighted by the reviewers in their insightful questions and comments: (a) the methodological implications of decentring the police as ethnographic protagonists; (b) the potentials and limitations of the Rancièrian perspective in anthropological approaches to policing; and (c) the martyr and the political theology of resistance.