City & Society最新文献

This article investigates the relationship of discourses around community to larger urban processes of development and displacement in Bangkok, Thailand. It focuses on two sites located along a major commercial corridor. The first, undergoing a process of relocation that involves establishing collective land tenure, goes by the Thai term for community, chumchon, though architects and planners frequently refer to it as a “slum.” The second site, an upscale “community mall” called the Commons, is a newly constructed open-air commercial space built to serve Bangkok's young, hip creative class. The eviction of the poor chumchon residents in favor of wealthy café-goers may look like a prime example of larger structural forces of what is often called “gentrification” or “accumulation by dispossession.” However, these sweeping narratives around global capitalist processes miss critical aspects of how the discursive construction of community around these two sites has enabled their physical construction and deconstruction. We demonstrate that rhetorics, imagery, and practices of community serve to valorize the existence of one site while justifying the removal of the other. This analysis demonstrates this outcome was not just the inevitable result of impersonal structural forces. It was displacement through the commons, fueled by discourses around community.

This article examines an incident of fire in a squatter settlement in Delhi to understand the interaction between the urban poor and the state. Following the incident, the Delhi government undertook different welfare measures for the affected residents. These included immediate relief in the form of temporary tents for the families, a proposal to build proper houses for them, and compensation checks as direct monetary support. The empirical materials presented in this article show how state interventions tend to suffer from deficiencies of knowledge, trust, and bureaucratic effectiveness. Thus, they do not commensurate with the apparent intentions behind them. Each of these welfare measures engendered an entanglement of the urban poor in the state that affects their relationship to the law, urban space, the local economy, and bureaucratic structures. Analyzing the unfolding of the everyday state on the ground, I suggest that a squatter settlement's dynamic and entangled relationships with the state make it a unique site for analysis of the state from an urban perspective. Critical interpretations of their interactions and the discourses they engender are key ethnographic resources for understanding the dynamics of inequality in contemporary cities.

Urban planners and foreign donors have long agonized over how politics, movement, and transportation infrastructure collide in the conjoined cities of El Alto and La Paz, Bolivia. As displaced tin and silver miners migrated to El Alto in droves during the 1980s and 1990s, they banked on that transportation sector to remake their lives, investing their severance packages in the lumbering “Micro” buses and minibuses that now choke both cities’ streets. La Paz’s patchwork of neighborhoods reflects its own history—and present—of racialized class mobility. This article examines the governance politics of municipal efforts to reform pedestrian and driver behavior in cities—mundane habits of movement that are freighted with political significance. In these urban education campaigns, the ways that residents move through transportation infrastructure comprises an important dimension of what it means to be a good citizen. As youth dressed as Cebras (zebras) playfully instruct residents on responsible urban behavior, they expose the somatic and especially kinesthetic dimensions of urban governance and belonging in the city. This article argues for greater attention to the forms of bodily attunement promoted by urban education campaigns and mobilized by city residents during daily encounters with transportation infrastructure.

Drawing on 3 years of fieldwork (2007–2010) in North Central Philadelphia with homeless and transiently-housed Black people who use drugs, this article explores the politics of mutual aid and community survival during a period of city-sponsored redevelopment. Drawing on Black feminist theory, I show how this community responded to and resisted their marginalization from urban space and Philadelphia history through developing a theory and practice of collective care. Resisting narratives that would position them as “worthless throwaways,” my informants responded to and reworked dominant narratives about what being a Black person who uses drugs means. As redevelopment threatened their neighborhood with increasing velocity, I reflect on how policing and incarceration disrupted my informants'—and my—relationship to history and urban space. I argue that in the shooting galleries, I learned the politics of anti-disposability: the right to live (and not just die) a junky.

In Kevin Lynch's (1960) classic formulation of the image of the city, he asks us to think about urban environments as a series of topographic registers on the landscape, from monuments to mountains, paths to edges, nodes, and junctions. There is a human element to this vision, with its concentrations and convergences in social space; think of the hangout value of a street corner or how the cut of a railway marks off a cultural district. However, these registers can also seem static. The city is laid out (Lynch was an urban planner after all) and people move within its gridlines. The authors of the articles in this special section—Samprati Pani, Annemiek Prins, Catherine Earl, and Nikolaos Olma—posit a different imagining of the city: diverse forms of mobility, understood sensorially. These are ethnographies attuned to the movement of bodies through space, where the image of the city is the movement itself. This sensorial approach highlights a particular relationship between city and society by focusing on daily practices of mobility and their repetition through urban space—practices that are individual and begin in the body but have social, political, and cultural resonances and ultimately forms. These are mobility practices that make grooves in the urban landscape and shape people's lives. I think of this experiential and sensorial approach as key to “the moving city,” an idea developed in my own research about how Delhi's new metro rail system reorders that city's landscape (Sadana, 2022). The reordering is not only due to the physical imposition of new lines and stations but also because of the new itineraries being forged and followed by millions of riders. Similarly, in this special section, readers are treated to a range of ethnographic engagements with mobility practices and how they cultivate social and cultural pathways.

Each author begins by showcasing a particular form of mobility—walking, cycle-rickshaw driving, experiencing traffic, and taxi driving—as historically and materially situated in an urban and Asian context. “Asia” here is a place and continent more than an area, concept, or geopolitical monolith. There is nothing cohesive about Asia but there are shared characteristics across its urban public spaces. The four articles span Central, South, and Southeast Asia, across the cities of Tashkent, Delhi, Dhaka, and Ho Chi Minh City, and are located in the nation-states of Uzbekistan, India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam, respectively. These are places with different population densities and climates, though they are all imbued with colonial and imperial histories, postcolonial built environments, and more recent economic liberalizations, resulting in rising middle classes, persistent and entrenched inequalities, and new or changing mobilities. The cities’ infrastructures reflect these new “mobility regimes” composed of “norms and rules that shape movement, space, behavior, and conduct” (Sheller, 2018,

This article focuses on PREZEIS, an internationally acclaimed participatory slum governance program in Recife, Brazil. PREZEIS was implemented in 1987 and emerged out of a strong popular movement that resisted forced evictions of squatter settlements under the military regime (1964–1985). To date, however, its main objectives—upgrading slums and regularizing land rights—have not been achieved, and its executive powers have been dismantled over the years. We argue that this institutionalization of a popular movement gave birth to a “zombie program” that lives off the past and refuses to die. We advance the zombie metaphor through the Lacanian notion of “fetishistic disavowal,” of knowing PREZEIS is “dead” but still believing it can be revived through ritualistic, fetishistic activities. We argue that the challenge is to accept its death, opening up the possibility for something truly new to arise. In the conclusion, we also explore how this factors into broader debates on urban post-politics.

Moving beyond a rhythmanalysis approach to banal mobilities and diurnal journey making – commuting, visiting, shopping, leisure – this paper explores how place-dependent forms of transport shape the feel and flow of the city. Theorizing the city as polyrhythmic reveals multiple traces of local/global and past/present in the socio-historically situatedness of urban mobilities. Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City, I reconsider the dis/orderliness of different movements in the mega-urban postcolonial Global South. The paper's main arguments are arranged around the thick description of a scene in HCMC's everyday traffic flows as experienced from the curbside of one of the city's busy streets. I draw on concepts from avant guard musical composition to rethink the de-synchronization and disharmony of congested roads as polyrhythmic relations. Firstly, I deploy the concept of aleatory to offer an alternative explanation for unpredictable elements in metropolitan traffic flow. Secondly, I apply the concept of phasing, or syncing, to sensory experiences of roads to explore co-production of polyrhythmic relations. Thirdly, I reflect on isorhythmia and stochastic processes to analyze influences of models of digitization on repetition and randomness in mobilities.

This article posits the concept of “walking-as-dwelling” as a critical analytical frame to counter the dominant Western conceptualization of walking as an event or novel experience that is set apart from ordinary life. Walking-as-dwelling refers to how walking is bound with routines of work, domesticity, and leisure, through which people inhabit and make places. Drawing attention to the situatedness of walking in particular places and subjectivities, the article follows the walking practices of women in the Monday bazaar of Nizamuddin Basti, a low-income neighborhood in Delhi. It examines how women's walking itineraries, rhythms, and techniques co-constitute the bazaar as a dynamic spacetime configuration, making and remaking the public and social character of the bazaar. It draws attention to the creative and political potential of ordinary practices of walking through which the Basti's women negotiate constraints of gender and class and, in the process, forge affective ties with the bazaar, perform modes of sociality, and articulate freedom and mobility.

This article addresses the everyday forms of urban precarity, which is under-studied in the context of Finnish cities. We examine how urban precarity becomes lived, practiced, and resisted in the case of a suburban open-air shopping center in Helsinki, Finland. Referring to precarity as a socio-spatial condition that reveals the precariousness of urban people and places, this study discovered everyday forms of urban precarity in detailed materialities and tactics; in housing, food, and addiction struggles; and in movements and networks. These mundane manifestations revealed that precarity could be approached in more relative terms that are not linked with certain neighborhoods but that emerge as spaces with intersecting nodes of services, networks, mobilities, and sociality. We conclude that particular places across urban spaces, where these aspects intersect, can be central to the ways precarity is navigated in the city and to increasing understandings of the mechanisms through which spaces of precarity are constructed in the city. The methodological choices used in this article—volunteer ethnography and vignettes—present profound accounts of the microscale lived experience, and bring humanness to a context that often exhibits stereotypes and marginality.