City & Society最新文献

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.

In the past decade, Brazil's largest city, São Paulo, has witnessed an exponential growth in private security. In this article, we contribute to understandings of how security shapes urban life by focusing on what we call hospitality security, which takes place in elite spaces of residence and leisure such as high-end neighborhoods, gated communities, and shopping malls. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that hospitality security is a specific urban formation that combines protection with care for spaces and clients. As such, it is not just another paid protection service, but is viewed as a necessary force for creating a desirable quality of life and fostering an ease of urban circulation that is seen as absent from public spaces due to high crime and ongoing eruptions of police violence. Hospitality security thus attempts to produce urban stability and predictability by maintaining harmony in residential and commercial environments and ensuring foreseeable social interactions while requiring security guards to uphold an unequal, racialized status quo.

For as long as I have been writing anthropology, Anthony Leeds Prize honorees have been among my compass points. When A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People was just a sketch in my grad school notebooks, they helped me imagine the “field” for an ethnography of the crabgrass-like phenomenon that is Food Not Bombs (FNB), a transnational web of anarchist soup kitchens that recover discarded food (via donation or dumpster), prepare it safely, and distribute it publicly, mostly to people experiencing homelessness and hunger. For over forty years, without any formal structure or budget, the movement has fed millions of people in hundreds of cities on every continent except Antarctica. In the process, it illustrates and resists the inequities of the neoliberal city. Comprising a motley assemblage of punks, vagrants, students, migrants, hackers, Quakers, and other radicals, FNB was described to me by one collaborator as “a mass conspiracy—to feed people!”

But how to study such a thing?

Leeds recipients have consistently charted such novel anthropological objects and territories, laying groundwork for the global, transurban mode of ethnography to which A Mass Conspiracy aspires. As exemplars of an anthropology in, of, and for the city, they have advanced innovations of scale and epistemology in the very parameters of “the field” and rearticulated our ethical and methodological commitments to subjects in, and of, urban space. They have mobilised urban insights and imperatives in ways that resonate beyond any specific city or subdiscipline. I have turned to many of them repeatedly, and passed their work on to students who might benefit from the same sense of scope and engagement that has so inspired me.

So imagine the honour, and incredulity, of finding my work on this list. If the book has been passed this particular baton, it is because it aims to keep some of the promises of the canon of the Leeds Prize.

The most important of those has been a commitment to an urban anthropology that is also a commitment to communities, relationships, and issues native to my own backyard. Practitioners of such an anthropology seek to bring ethnographic tools to bear on the near and the familiar, to mobilise their findings in situ, in those spaces where we are already entangled. The book emerges from at least fifteen years of connection to the cities and communities in question. From the first words I typed on a blank page, I pictured the book one day nestled on the shelves of my favourite anarchist bookstore in Seattle, Left Bank Books. I imagined it catching the eye of eager activists not unlike myself at twenty-three, when I first read about FNB—for which I credit ethnographer Jeff Ferrel's 2001 Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy (so I was particularly moved when he wrote comments for my back cover!). I am proud to say that when A Mass Conspiracy was launched, I held th

The US–Mexico border has influenced social-cultural theory by drawing attention to hybrids that stand apart from supposedly cohesive wholes. This point, albeit important, does not exhaust the lessons to be learned from the US–Mexico border region. It also displays highly unequal power relations. Adjacent, interactive, but profoundly asymmetrical border city pairs are key sites for analyzing unequal relationships between the so-called global South and global North. This social relationality of apparently contrastive endpoints, and the cultural frameworks and practices that mediate the connections, is yet another lesson from the US–Mexico border. Culture occurs in a matrix of often highly unequal social relationships. Culture is made and reproduced at relational meeting points between differentiated positionalities, even when there is an apparently exclusionary border in between.

In 2018, the Morandi bridge collapsed, killing 43 people and displacing 600 from their homes in Genoa's postindustrial outskirts. Almost entirely isolated after the collapse, Certosa bore much of the brunt of the disaster. This is when Genoa's conservative administration launched On the Wall, a street art project meant to assuage residents’ anger; the theme chosen for the murals was “joy.” Drawing on ethnographic research conducted between 2019 and 2022, this project explores the post-political underpinnings of Certosa's “joyous” street art.

These murals, I suggest, are an attempt by the city administration to enact a type of aesthetic governance that seeks to conceal institutional neglect while foreclosing political antagonism; this happens through a distribution of the sensible (Ranciѐre 2010, 24-25) that is meant to promote consensus by shaping the residents’ perception of their neighborhood. However, I also contend that, instead of fostering a post-political allegiance between Genoa's conservative administration and Certosa's residents, the street art project failed to sway a community organized around the awareness of its own disenfranchisement. Since Certosa's ruination continued unabated, beleaguered residents intensified their demands for the safety and the basic services that are still denied to their neighborhood.

In 2021, the Society for Urban, National, Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA), a section of the American Anthropological Association, changed its name to Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA). This essay addresses the question “What is Critical About Critical Urban Anthropology?” by reflecting on problematic assumptions about African cities that are perpetuated over time and the need to critique these ideas. I suggest a more active and participatory approach to pedagogy is necessary to creating a critical urban anthropology that can help to challenge these assumptions.