City & Society最新文献

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.

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.

This article takes the cycle-rickshaw industry in Dhaka, Bangladesh, as a point of departure for examining the discrepancy between the everyday rhythms and embodied realities of Dhaka traffic and the idealized image of mobility that drives imaginations of the urban future. The cycle-rickshaw is often excluded from such imaginations, as the vehicle is not only blamed for obstructing the flow of traffic but also for impeding trajectories of urban change. I argue that such exclusionary notions of the urban future, which build on linear and epochal notions of urban change, obscure the many ways in which everyday mobilities gesture to temporal experiences of endurance rather than transformation. I employ the notion of endurance to capture both the physical effort of navigating Dhaka traffic and the distinct temporality of rickshaw labor. I show that rickshaw labor, although arduous, allows drivers to keep on going amidst the various needs of the present by providing them with “instant cash.” Rickshaw mobilities thus highlight the friction between epochal notions of urban change and the durability and contingency of the imperfect safety nets and practices that people rely on for the time being.

Decades of politically motivated place renaming have prompted the population of Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, to adopt a bottom-up vernacular toponymic register, wherein locations are indicated in relation to points of reference known as orientiry. Orientiry take cues from the built environment and are generated through the population's affective pluritemporal engagements with the city. Accordingly, they can take different material forms, but they can also be dropped or discursively replaced by new ones situated temporally or physically closer to the population's everyday experiences. This article argues that orientiry are kept more or less coherent by the need for Tashkent dwellers to indicate locations to their fellow residents and especially to Tashkent's informal taxi drivers. Orientiry are proliferated and standardized by the exchange of environmental information that occurs between driver and passenger as they find their way through various places and temporalities. The article demonstrates how a combination of cognition, affect, and social stimuli shapes wayfinding in Tashkent, revealing the city's orientiry as a representation of a collective image of the city—an assemblage of individual mental maps that overlap, interfere, contradict, and exclude one another and yet remain functional by similar habitual use of the city.

Policing in Rio de Janeiro is notorious for its brutality. For Unidades da Policía Pacificadora (UPP), a proximity policing program marked by less overt violence, the forging of trust became a strategy for reshaping the image of police and favelas. Yet, this policing model reproduced racial and gender bias that was persistent in broader Brazilian society where trust is coded as white and female while danger is coded as Black and male. In UPP, these ideologies manifested in using lighter-skinned and female officers to produce trust through whiteness and gender. For residents, pacification underscored a longstanding racial encoding of citizenship and trust as performances of whiteness and belonging. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2015 among the military police and in favelas, I examine in this article how Brazilian ideologies of race and gender intersect with local notions about trustworthiness and class. For the UPPs, enforcing trust was attached to the expectation of submission and uniformity—ultimately strengthening white supremacy. Through intimate ethnographic accounts of commanders' and residents' experiences, I show the nuanced ways trust intersects with local ideas about race and gender and how it served both as a vehicle for pacification and as a mode of citizenship.