Abstracts

KEYNOTE LECTURES

City, Nation, Network: Shifting Territorialities
of Sovereigntyand Urban Violence in the Global South 

Diane E. Davis , Harvard University 

Cities across Latin America and elsewhere in the global south are experiencing unprecedented levels of violence that have transformed the social and spatial character of the city while also producing ever greater exposure to everyday risk and vulnerability. Such problems are often experienced most viscerally among poorer residents, thus reinforcing longstanding socio-spatial conditions of exclusion, inequality, and reduced “rights to the city” for those most exposed to urban violence.  Frequently these problems are understood through the lens of poverty, informality, and limited employment opportunities. Yet an undertheorized and equally significant factor in the rise of urban violence derives from the shifting territorialities of governance and power, which are both cause and consequences of ongoing struggles within and between citizens and state authorities over the planning and control of urban space for divergent purposes. This keynote suggests that an underexplored but fruitful way to understand these dynamics is through the lens of sovereignty. It theorizes the shifting spatial correlates of sovereignty and their impacts on violence, particularly as mediated by urbanization patterns. It argues that  the spatial form of the city produces and is produced by changing political and economic relations unequally distributed between the rulers and the ruled, ultimately leading to spaces of exclusion where justice and rule of law are absent and violence flourishes.  Drawing on examples from Mexico and other parts of urban Latin America, it suggests that intractability of violence is due to problems of fragmented sovereignty, a condition built upon the emergence of competing and at times overlapping networks of authority at the scale of the city, nation, and globe. It advocates for new efforts to  redesign cities and urban spaces with a focus on a shared public sphere, so as to push back against the limits of current sovereignty arrangements. 

 

Predatory Formations Dressed in Wall Street Suits
and Algorithmic Math 

Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

Assemblages of complex types of knowledge and technologies—including algorithmic mathematics, law and accounting, and high-level logistics—have generated complex predatory formations. The complexity of these formations tends to camouflage their predatory character. Further, such formations are systemic in nature. They are not produced by an elementary seizure of power. Predatory formations are often beyond the reach of ordinary policy responses, in good part because they tend to assemble elements of separate domains into novel configurations. In fact we need new law that can encompass these formations. The focus here is on one of the more powerful and complex predatory formations, (high) finance. And the effort is to explain how even the most sophisticated financial instruments require certain elementary and brutal steps, resulting in highly degraded socio-economic outcomes.

 

Life and Death in the Urbicene: The de-politicized fantasy of Anthropocenic urbanization 

Erik Swyngedouw, Department of Geography, The University of Manchester 

In this presentation, I shall refer to ‘the Anthropocene’ — or better the Urbicene — as the popularized term to denote a new geological era during which humans have arguably acquired planetary geo-physical agency in an earth system understood as a complex, non-linear, and indeterminate configuration with multiple feedback loops and heterogeneous dynamics in which (some) human activities have become integral parts of these terraforming processes. Planetary urbanization structured by predominantly capitalist socio-ecological dynamics is of course the geographical imprint of this Anthropocenic dynamic.  

This capitalist form of planetary urbanization and the socio-ecological and political-economic processes that animate its combined and uneven socio-ecological catastrophe on a world scale are now generally recognized as key drivers of anthropogenic climate change and other socio-environmental transformations and crises (most recently plastics have become new eco-terror). The configuration of this urban metabolic relationship has now been elevated to the dignity of global public concern.  

Indeed, a global urban intellectual and professional technocracy has spurred a frantic search for a ‘smart’ socio-ecological urbanity and seeks out the socio-ecological qualities of eco-development, retrofitting, sustainable architecture, adaptive and resilient urban governance, reducing greenhouse emissions, the making of new inter-species eco-topes, and technologically innovative – but fundamentally market-conforming – eco-design. These depoliticized techno-managerial dispositifs that search for eco-prophylactic remedies for the predicament we are in have now been consensually established as the frontier of architectural, urban planning, and environmental governance theory and practice, presumably capable of saving both city and planet, while assuring that civilization as we know it can continue for a little longer. Under the banner of radical techno-managerial restructuring, the focus is now squarely on how to sustain combined and uneven capitalist urbanity so that nothing really has to change! 

 

PAPERS SYMPOSIUM

Fracturing Public Space: The Perils of Living Together in Congo’s Cities 

Filip De Boeck, Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa (IARA), University of Leuven 

In Kinshasa, the capital of the D.R.Congo, the many cleavages that divide its citizens (in terms of class, ethnic background, political adherence, generational rifts and so on) constantly generate powerful geographies of exclusion inscribed onto the city’s surface. But at the same time, these dynamics of exclusion are also overcome by a fracturing of the city’s public space, which produces a violence of proximity but also manages to transcend that violence and turn it into a more inclusive force because of that very same proximity, and the fact that people, for better or for worse, have to rely on each other for survival in this harsh urban environment. Public space thus emerges as a conglomerate of multiple spaces that are constantly being ‘privatised’, in various degrees and with varying levels of success, generating a constant push and pull between individualization and the refutation of group identity, and the necessities of collective belonging. This paper will explore some of these dynamics by focusing on specific groups of market women, and how they negotiate their presence in the public space of the market. 

 

The Conditions of Possibility, Instruments and Constrains of Developing a New Urban Progressive Regime in Madrid (2015-2019) 

Rosa de la Fuente, Complutense University of Madrid, Clara Medina García, KU Leuven, Simón Sánchez-Moral, Complutense University of Madrid

For the last decade, urban actors have been struggling to adapt to a post-crisis and austerity context with an increasing social mobilization and spatial experimentation, that are challenging established urban regimes and governance systems and opening the door to an urban democracy renewal. This paper pays attention to the process of creating a new urban progressive regime (Stone 1993) through the construction of a new governance system and the redesign of social and public collaborative networks. For this aim, we propose a three-fold transversal analytical framework combining the perspectives of social innovation (Moulaert 2009), democratic innovation and urban regime theory to analyse how power (to act) is created and used to accomplish urban change. This framework will be applied to the case of Madrid city to unveil the confluence of elements that make possible to attempt to build a new progressive regime after local elections in 2015,  based on the implementation of innovative public interventions and pilot projects; the activation of collective intelligence through processes of collective deliberation and decision-making and the experimentation with possibilities for co-production of public policies.

 

Political Animals: A Multispecies Approach to Urban Inequalities   

Rivke Jaffe, University of Amsterdam   

In cities across the world, animals reflect, reproduce and transform urban inequalities – yet their role in mediating social relations remains undertheorized within urban studies. Recent urban scholarship has sought to understand how social inequality is mediated by infrastructure, technology and other forms of materiality. Yet cities are inhabited and produced not only by people and things, but also by animals. With their ambiguous subject/object position, animals play an important and unique role in shaping urban inequalities that is still poorly understood. Drawing on research on security dogs in Kingston, Jamaica, this paper discusses the role of animals in the formation of sociospatial boundaries, and the distribution of resources and risks across urban spaces and populations. In Kingston, security dogs have been socialized to identify threatening individuals on the basis of classed and racialized markers. The dogs’ perceptions of threat interact with more high-tech security systems and the everyday practices of security professionals, often reproducing entrenched forms of exclusion. Focusing on interactions between dogs, humans and infrastructure, the paper explores how animals’ everyday interactions with their cultural and material environments combine to result in (in)equitable social outcomes. 

 

Urban Violence, Resilience, and the Limits of Inclusive Security Policy: The Rise and Collapse of Favela Pacification in Rio de Janeiro (2009-2019) 

Kees Koonings, CEDLA/University of Amsterdam and Department of Anthropology, Utrecht University

For decades Latin America has been considered the most lethally violent region in the world. To a large degree this sorry status has been produced by urban violence, in particular in cities in Brazil, Central America, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela. Scholarship has evolved from examining violent actors and their urban ecologies to the political conditions and limits of state security policies and the determinants and outcomes of so-called ‘urban resilience’: the ability of urban actors, institutions, and assemblages to respond to (chronic) violence. The aim of this paper is, first, to review this debate and in particular to develop the concept of urban resilience as an analytical tool for responses to violence in (Latin American) fractured and exclusionary cityscapes. Second, to use this framework to examine the case of ‘pacification policing’ in Rio de Janeiro from its inception in 2009 to its final collapse in 2019. Toward the end of the 2000s, Brazil’s booming economy and the global city aspirations of Rio de Janeiro inspired an apparently radical shift in security policy. Permanent police presence in strategic favelas was expected to oust the drug traffickers (not the militias), reduce lethal violence, engage peacefully with residents, produce trust in public governability, and create propitious conditions for urban resilience through economic and social development in the favelas and their inclusion into the broader urban assemblage. Now, a decade later, three years after the 2016 Summer Olympics, and with Brazil engulfed in crisis and political polarization, this strategy of pacification policing has failed. What can this failure tell us about the nature and limitations of urban public security policies as vector for resilience in unequal and fractured cities? 

 

Indeterminate Spaces in Latin America’s Modernist Housing Estates 

Dalia Milián Bernal & Panu Lehtovuori, Tampere University

Modernist social housing estates belong to the most radical physical manifestations of the socially-minded welfare state in Latin America. In the time of their conception, the estates represented a new, orderly and overly defined spatial organization. Following the principles of the modern movement in architecture and planning, originated in Europe and the United States, they exemplified a unilateral vision of what constituted the modern city, for whom it was built and for which reasons. In recent decades, the original vision has been shattered. Because of the collapse of the welfare state and various local reasons, under-defined and indeterminate spaces have emerged in these estates, opening possibilities for spatial and social innovations and new forms of spatial production. 

Adopting an architectural and urbanistic point of view, the paper discusses two Latin American modernist social housing estates: Centro Urbano Nonoalco-Tlatelolco in Mexico City and Remodelación San Borja in Santiago de Chile. Based on primary and secondary data, it analyses the circumstances that created indeterminate spaces and explores new forms of spatial interventions unfolding in the changing estates. Key argument is that the under-defined or loose spaces allow for an innovative form of spatial production that challenges the predefined agencies of residents and other users. Interestingly, the bureaucratically organised abstract spaces have been appropriated and reshaped to important social spaces that contribute to wellbeing and social justice,despite the rather adverse political and economic climate in contemporary Mexico and Chile. 

 

Kjell-Åke Nordquist, University College Stockholm

Although there are many claims to the contrary, the nation-state as a unit in the development of international relations, including national and international jurisdictions, are also in times of globalization an important player on different levels in the global community. The nation-state remains an important fall back structure when other levels of governance or cooperation fail to meet their expectations. For that and other reasons it is reasonable to assume an active life of the nation-state also in the future: it will serve as a refugee and reference point for actors with supranational ambitions. Actually, the concept of ”supranational” wouldn’t make sense of the nation-state wasn’t there.  

The debate about the future role of the nation-state has however for long been based on perceived challenges from its outside, a debate with main positions identified in either introvert or extrovert terms.  

This paper is taking another view on possible challenges to the longevity of the nation-state as the builder of international relations and a global system. This is done by posing characteristics of the mega-city (or anyone of its conceptual family members describing large-scale physical concentrations of people, production and pollution) in relation to basic features of the nation-state. Focus in this analysis are thus issues of perceived structural challenges from within the nation-state, emanating from the nature of the mega-city.  

The study of the relationship between the mega-city and its host state is including a case analysis of Kolkata,  India. Indications from the case speak towards two separate roles of the nation-state and the mega-city, respectively, in responding to globalization. These roles put the two – the nation-state and the mega-city – on long term diverging development tracks, in particular when it comes to security, territorial control and other dimensions of state-building. The paper outlines these developments and points at some possible critical moments, or tipping points, likely to be challenging a fundamental unit in the Westphalian state system. 

 

On the fringes of urban justice: Perceptions of violence in precarious settlements in Guatemala City

Florencia Quesada, University of Helsinki 

Living in the ‘ravines’ of Guatemala City (which surround the city and limit its growth) is the common destiny of thousands of poor urban dwellers. The ravines represent one of the most visible and unjust urban spaces in the capital. Drawing on interviews in two at-risk communities in Guatemala City, the paper seeks to address the multifaceted problems the urban dwellers of these disadvantage spaces confront, focusing on violence.

This paper contextualizes spatial injustice by studying the specific conditions of urban life and by analysing the collective struggles in these communities, to improve their current disadvantaged and precarious living conditions. Drawing on theoretical ideas of Edward Soja, the paper focuses on these two communities to analyse where and how (in)justice takes place in order to understand the search for spatial justice in socially differentiated contexts. I examine residents’ perceptions of risk and insecurity in relation to urban violence, and the impact they have on everyday life and social relations. A further aim of the study is to understand how these marginalised communities cope with those fears and risks, and the individual strategies and/or collective struggles they have developed to improve their current living conditions of disadvantage and precariousness.

 

Cargo, Crime, and Commodification: Private Security in Rio de Janeiro . Security Professionals: Escolta Armada and the Carreira das Armas

Erika  Robb Larkins, San Diego State University 

In past decade, Rio de Janeiro has seen enormous growth in armed hijacking of cargo trucks. The organized criminal gangs that have traditionally relied solely on drug trafficking for their profits are now expanding into new criminal frontiers by targeting the consumer goods that make up the majority of cargo. They carry out a hijacking every nine minutes, a rate that is among the highest in the world. At the same time, Rio, like Brazil more generally, has seen a boom in the private provision of security, with a growing sector focused on the armed protection of valuables as they are transported across the city. I argue that cargo security is unique in that it is largely unconcerned with territory or with people, but focused instead on opening a safe passage for capital to move to market. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with company owners, private security guards, and in private security training facilities, I explore how the political economy of cargo crime and cargo security are scripting neoliberal logics onto city space in Rio. Complementing approaches to security which consider territoriality or containment, this talk asks whether cargo security can be considered a post-spatial phenomenon or whether it simply re-entrenches space-based urban segregation.  

 

The Making of a Progressive Polity: Change in Public Education and Environmental Protection in Bogotá 

Mauricio Romero, Universidad Javeriana/ University of Helsinki

This paper examines how progressive majors, parties, and movements in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, have shaped an alternative and inclusive path to state consolidation in the new century, different than the one supported by dominant national coalitions. The latter have emphasized a coercive path to solve the long armed conflict, including the delegation of the use of violence to non-state armed groups since the end of the past century. The paper shows how the Bogotano electorate has supported a negotiated solution to the violent confrontation, while the other main cities and regions have voted for the use of force to defeat the insurgents without any reforms in the past 20 years. The analysis highlights the role of majors, parties, and movements in creating a progressive polity in the middle of wide political competition and armed confrontation all over the Colombian territory. The study focusses on two different arenas of political, trade union, and social activism that have strengthened an inclusive perspective on urban politics, which had been sidelined since the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán, a popular leader who defied the traditional elites, in 1948. 

The first arena is the public education sector, which became a field of innovation and inclusion after the decentralization of the state at the end of the past century. Networks of knowledge associated with public and private universities, the public teacher’s union and new political coalitions were able to engage state bureaucracies and politicians at the national and local level and take the first steps in reforming the sector with broad impact. The second arena is the environmental protection, a field of policy debate in which networks of knowledge, social activists and progressive politicians have shaped the terms of the national and local discussion with broad impact in creating an opposition to the “extractivist” agenda of national coalitions. The case of Bogotá illustrates how new “networks of trust” make their way to public politics and can shape trajectories of state consolidation, or at least show the possibility of a different path.  

 

Cities of Exclusion. Demands and Expectations of Young Residents of Impoverished Neighborhoods in Central America

Carlos Sandoval, University of Costa Rica 

This article intends to document, analyze and discuss the demands and expectations of young residents of impoverished neighborhoods in Central American capital cities.  Four main subject areas will be explored: the representation of the local and national environment, demands and desires for the future, the means by which young people expect to achieve (or not achieve) said demands, and sociodemographic factors. The selected neighborhoods were El Limón in Guatemala City, Popotlán in San Salvador, Nueva Capital in Tegucigalpa, Jorge Dimitrov in Managua, and La Carpio in San José.  This article is based on three main theoretical and methodological goals.  The first is to explore how socially excluded populations experience politics.  The second goal is to transcend the division between analytical research, which is often based on causal studies, and interpretive research, which is centered around meaning.  The third goal is to contribute to the construction of a regional and comparative view of Central American societies.

One of the primary findings of the study is that 37.7% of participants neither study nor work and that only 15% have access to social security.  Of the people surveyed, 32% are mothers and 13% are fathers.  45% of the mothers surveyed gave birth to their first child before the age of 18. In terms of how the young residents perceive their environment, the primary problems recognized were delinquency, unemployment, and the lack of public infrastructure.  Although inequality was not identified as being among the most pressing problems, when asked about the distribution of wealth in their respective countries, 73.6% of participants considered said distribution to be “very unfair” or “unfair.”  This recognition of inequality coexists with a deeply rooted conservatism and a largely unquestioned belief in the legitimacy of destiny and parental authority. Pearson’s chi-square test affirms that perceptions of wealth distribution, perceptions of violence, and a lack of confidence in the police influence individuals’ intentions to leave the country.

This article concludes that the young participants’ primary expectations and demands center around employment, opportunities and safety.  Meanwhile, the electoral cycle that began in Honduras in 2017 and will conclude in Guatemala in 2019 is far from offering any kind of significant or profound response.  This electoral cycle has deepened the institutional void, and in many cases immigration has become more of an obligation than a choice.   

 

Landscape, Performance, and Justice in Urban Planning: Reflections from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 

Bjørn Sletto, University of Texas at Austin 

My paper seeks to examine the potential of a post-representational approach to urban planning in informal settlements. I focus specifically on the role of emotional geographies of landscapes and everyday performance in producing new material and social spaces, and in so doing, perhaps facilitating opportunities for insurgent planning action (Miraftab, 2009).  I draw on a post-representational understanding of landscapes as simultaneously lived and represented (Lindholm, 2011) and the role of emotion in “making sense” of landscapes (Harrison, 2000) within the context of spatial and social marginalization.  

I build on 12 years of activist research in the informal settlement of Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. When I first started working in Los Platanitos, residents referred to the community as El Rincón de los Olvidados (“Corner of the Forgotten People”). This nickname reflected their profound sense of abandonment by city authorities. They built their community at the site of a large landfill in a steep canyon in the 1980s but struggled ever since for basic infrastructure provision such as garbage collection, potable water, sewage systems, and electricity. In particular, they suffered from the severe contamination and flooding of the cañada (drainage channel) that bisected the densely populated community.  

My work in Los Platanitos has been pursued in collaboration with residents and Dominican civil society organizations, often accompanied by graduate students from the University of Texas, and has focused on environmental risk, solid waste management, and capacity-building and development of community-based organizations. One particularly important initiative has been a vermicomposting project (composting using earthworms to speed up the decomposition process) initiated by the women-led organization Mujeres Unidas in 2012. The project was intended to provide a source of income for members of the organization, but it has become even more important as a site for community-based planning. It has become a symbolically meaningful site as members of Mujeres Unidas gather for meetings and deposit food waste into the composting bins, producing a hopeful counterpoint to the common narrative of Los Platanitos as a dystopian, “unplanned” landscape. This case illustrates the complex articulations between landscape and emotion while foregrounding the agency of residents in the face of exclusion and marginalization. 

 

Networks of Resistance and Urban Repression in Colombia 

Elisa Tarnaala, University of Helsinki

This paper examines the interdependence of repression and resistance as a dynamic shaped by the armed conflict, and how this interdependence has impacted the understanding of social struggle, participation and political change in the urban context of Bogota, the capital of Colombia. The paper emphasizes how violence against leaders and activists transformed since the 1970s, from having purely “national security” motives to a phenomenon defined as sociopolitical violence that includes social cleansing; and how the transnational linkages of both repression and dissent could be understood. After the successfully concluded peace process between the Colombian government and the largest guerilla group FARC in 2016, the democratization of rural Colombia has been considered priority for the stabilization of the country. In the urban contexts of the large and medium scale cities however, important initiatives regarding citizenship, participation of politically marginalized groups and complex memory exist as repertoires of resistance and as building blocks for reconciliation.