City & Society最新文献

I propose a dialogue between new abolitionist approaches and black feminist theory on the one hand and anticapitalist critical urban social theory on the other. This dialogue has great potential to advance approaches that unhide the death dealing logics that shape city-making and also to identify and amplify the emancipatory potentialities and forms of cultural, social, economic, and political improvisation that can lead us to more positive futures.

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.

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.