City & Society最新文献

Confrontations between the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government and civil society regarding the demolition of historical sites across the city have been occurring since the mid-2000s. These clashes have been interpreted as the consequence of exclusionary heritage governance practices; postcolonial identity anxieties; and popular dissatisfaction toward economic injustices in the city. This essay argues that heritage mobilizations also arise from the competing meanings and expectations the SAR government and civil society have attached to notions of “urban heritage,” especially in relation to urban liveability discourses. Using documentary and ethnographic data, this essay provides an overview of Hong Kong’s heritage landscape before examining approaches by both government and civil society toward heritage conservation—reflecting their respective understandings as to what urban heritage entails for urban life. This essay finds the SAR government position heritage as being secondary to urban redevelopment, a means of establishing urban liveability in economic terms. In contrast, civil society actors frame heritage as integral to redevelopment, producing a liveable city through enriching social conviviality. By delineating the disparate ways urban heritage is valued in Hong Kong, this essay offers broader insights on the conflict regarding how present and future urban life is envisioned in Asian cities.

I have been thinking about what a critical urban anthropology does and means for the last ten years or so, as I have been researching Delhi’s new and massive urban rail system. The research is over, the book – The Moving City: Scenes from the Delhi Metro and the Social Life of Infrastructure (2022) – is out, but I am realizing more and more that this work has re-wired my brain in terms of how I think about cities and how I think I will approach them from here on out. This re-wiring has chiefly to do with the critical engagement with the city that the Delhi Metro required me to have, a two-fold process of rethinking my methodologies and reckoning with what “city” meant or stood for. At first, the metro system posed a methodological challenge: How was I going to study such a vast system ethnographically? How was I going to be everywhere I needed to be? And how exactly was I to study “the mass” in mass transit?

To this end, my critical urban anthropology began with reevaluating what ethnography might mean and do in a city of 20 million. How does one approach a megacity and the myriad forms of urbanization underway in it? How does the focus on the intricate and small-scale – the hallmark of anthropological research – get squared with the bigness of cities, their growth and the forms they spawn?

The “critical” in critical urban anthropology widens our perspective by challenging normative understandings of the city and its development, and it also compels us to see things in a new light, to juxtapose what is usually not juxtaposed, because practically speaking, this is what enables us to forge a new object of research or category or line of analysis. The urban is anything but static, and the “critical” highlights this dynamism, whether the urban is a place or a process, and it is often both.

With the Delhi Metro, the “critical” became a question of space and place, of grappling with the spatial dimensions of a multiline system and the dozens and then hundreds of metro stations strewn across the urban landscape, of scaling up and then down quickly and repeatedly. I started out by meeting officials, architects, urban planners, activists, politicians, and bureaucrats, mostly in offices, learning about their plans and executions and the bumpy roads between them. This meant understanding what was “critical” from their perspectives. But then, over the years, as three Metro lines became nine, I shifted to spending most of my time riding the trains. I witnessed and often took part in thousands of interactions across the city from ends to ends. I found that despite the straight lines on the Metro map, the city was not a set of linear relationships, and its borders were not fixed or clear cut. I started to see that the real challenge was not only going to be understanding what the “city” was geographically and bureaucratically, but also, what it meant to people and how they negotiated their lives through it. And here I se

Geographical space is more than a Cartesian plane where actors move across coordinates. It has a moral weight that renders each move subject to moral discourse. Yet, rarely does this premise prevent people from exploring spaces that are associated with anything wrong or bad. In fact, we continue to find people in places where they should not be, and doing things that are not just communally shunned but also personally acknowledged to be wrong or bad. Why is that the case? This paper draws on my ethnography on Turkish men who live in Strasbourg and socialize in its German neighbor, Kehl, to examine the role of space in the production of moral and masculine dispositions and practices. Approaching the Strasbourg-Kehl border as a moral boundary, I examine how crossing the border to Kehl constitutes an integral part of the journey that my interlocutors take in constructing their moral and masculine selves. In this journey, spatial transgressions are not diverted but embraced, and confronted. These transgressions also produce anxieties—mistakes which in moments of self-reflection lead to regrets. In such moments, two logics come into play: consequentialism and blame. The first builds on Islamic notions of fallibility and nefs, while the latter brings Kehl into the picture as a moral alibi—a space that takes blame for sins. The latter also helps others in the community who fail to prevent men from going to Kehl and transgressing moral boundaries to transpose culpability. In conclusion, I emphasize the need to consider the making and maintenance of masculinities and moralities in conjunction with the lived environments where such identities are formed and performed.

In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling (“greywater”) systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city’s water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city’s water grid. Elaborating the longstanding frictions over greywater reuse in LA reveals how these fixtures are mobilized by advocates to rescript the roles of both individuals and the state within the urban waterscape. Detailing public agency workers’ resistance to this form of selective disconnection from the grid helps to clarify the patterns of flows, norms of consumption, and forms of state control at stake in efforts to decentralize arrangements of urban water management.

The migrant families who build India’s cities do so to meet practical and ritual aspirations rooted in the village, undergoing spatial and temporal fragmentation to maintain rural longevity and the possibilities of ritual time. This article contributes an alternative position to linear-framed presumptions of migration and urbanity, illustrating instead how everyday experiences of dislocation can be productive through labor, timespace, and imagination; bridging the gulf between residence on urban construction sites in Bengaluru, southern India, and desired village homes. However, lived experiences of dislocation remain stratified by gender and class, leading to highly conjugated experiences of precarity, mobility, and possibility. Despite the urban ambivalence felt by women and girls as a result, a shared experience of dislocation enables entire families to undertake the grueling yet regenerative work of circular migration, ensuring the continuation and renewal of village life and ritual time through its incompleteness.

This article investigates parent advocacy in the child welfare system amongst families living in low-income and racialized urban areas, those most impacted by this system. Drawing from my fieldwork experience at the community-based organization Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in East Harlem, New York, I interrogate the political trajectory of the organization, its practices, and its purpose. I analyze how the decision parents make to advocate is tied to the injustice, stigma, and surveillance they—and especially mothers—experience in the child welfare system. While exploring how parenting and its political dimension are reshaped for disfranchised mothers through advocacy, I describe the “fine line” between compliance and resistance that CWOP has walked throughout its history to preserve its existence. This article illustrates how this form of activism takes place within a fragmented and increasingly privatized welfare regime, in which community-based organizations struggle for their right to remain political actors and not be overtaken by the logic of service provision. Through my analysis, I aim to contribute to anthropological understandings of the forms of political agency taken up by stigmatized subjects in their interactions with the state, and the limits the state demonstrates in “hearing” their claims and requests for change.

In the 2010s, a new phenomenon was spotted in the Seoul Metro. K-pop fans began adorning subway stations with large ads congratulating their heroes—so-called K-pop idols—on their birthdays and other anniversaries. Not only have these fandom-produced ads transformed the visual landscape of the Seoul Metro, they also invited novel spatial practices when fans, primarily young women, toured the ads to take photographs of and with them. Based on ethnographic observations, this article explores how fandom ads and fans visiting them make the Seoul Metro social and public in new ways. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space, the article frames fans’ ads themselves and engagements they invite as assertions of the “right to the city,” and relates them to spatial interventions that reclaim urban spaces based on symbolic—not legal—ownership, such as murals and graffiti. The article argues that K-pop idol ads recapture the Seoul Metro from domination by commercial advertisers’ interests and appropriate it as a space of fandom, particularly female fandom. It also contends that this reorganization of space carries implications for a broader reclamation of subway surfaces as urban resources.