Urban Subjectivity Research Articles

Demystifying the Chinese local state: Planning and contesting urban growth at Hexi New Town, Nanjing

Taking note of the limitations of previously dominant political economy perspectives on China’s urban transformation, and inspired by recent works calling for “beyond-growth” and “micro-level” studies of the Chinese state, as well as ethnographic approaches to the state, this paper aims to explore the often-untold everyday politics of decision-making processes in China’s state-led urban development. Using an urban design project at Hexi New Town in Nanjing, China, as an empirical lens, the article makes three main contributions. Firstly, it reveals how the Chinese local state is constitutive of and lived through intense negotiations and contestations over urban visions, subjectivities, and rules of practices in everyday life. Secondly, building upon existing ethnographic approaches to the state, which focus primarily on state-society dynamics, this paper develops a framework to re-conceptualize the power topology within the Chinese local state as a field of relational modalities (ruling power relations (re)enacted in everyday practices) and relational embeddedness (situated positionalities and subjectivities of state actors). Thirdly, it further shows how the power modalities (the interplay of political-economy power vs technical-power, territorial power vs trans-territorial power) of the Chinese local state are constantly reworked, sometimes re-enacted, sometimes challenged, through both formal and tacit rules in the state’s everyday life. As such, the article provides a new set of entry points to open the black-box of the Chinese local state and to explore the relational nature and an ethnographic perspective of the local state and urban politics in China and beyond.

Who belongs where? Geographies of (inter)religion and urban segregation in Surabaya, Indonesia

This study addresses urban segregation along religious identities in Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya, and explores the disruptive potential of short interreligious visits to places of worship. It contributes to the existing academic literature in at least three ways, namely (1) by expanding discussions about geographies of religion into discussions about geographies of (inter)religion; (2) by connecting interreligious education initiatives with urban democratic politics (i.e., urban subjectivity and citizenship), and (3) by demonstrating the powerful role of body spatiality in disrupting religious urban geographies. Based on organised visits to various religious sites and subsequent qualitative interviews, we found that the unusual visibility of religiously diverse visitors contributed to the normalisation of multi-religious diversity, and participants' positive experiences at places of worship contributed to the development of empathy and solidarity with the religious Other. In discussing the implications of the study, we suggest that deliberate efforts of interreligious place-making on the part of political and religious leaders can counter urban religious segregation and contribute to social cohesion.

The enclaved body: Crises of personhood and the embodied geographies of urban gating

This essay analyzes embodied experiences of enclaving. It argues that by tracking revolutions in built form that gating enacts, urban geography has simultaneously tracked revolutions in urban subjectivity. It highlights three enclaved “body types” within existing literature: securitized bodies in fortressed cities, performative bodies in consumptive enclaves, and hygienic bodies in purified zones. It then offers three ethnographic scenes of gating related to new crises of personhood: metabolic illness, atmospheric breakdown, and resurgent ethno-nationalism. Attention to the psychic forces behind gating, it finally argues, can further show the gender, class, and ethnic underpinnings of what appear as generic architectural zones.

Being single, being ‘wrong’: pain and the remaking of gendered subjectivity in Delhi

This paper seeks to examine the role of social pain in the unmaking and remaking of urban subjectivities in a context of cultural change. I argue that doubt and uncertainty generated by shifting cultural boundaries underpins a drive to reassert extant social order, including gendered expectations, generating pain in the unmaking of subjectivities for those who are different or ‘other’. In the case of this study, the different are single, middle-aged, women in Delhi, standing outside normative familial structures and forced to answer the question ‘what’s wrong with you?’. However, everyday practices of repair and ‘swallowing’ pain could also work to remake a sense of self. Demonstrating invention as well as the politics of pain in their reclamations of space, these ‘wrong’ women reconfigured subjectivity as a form of cosmopolitanism often defined in opposition to ‘parochial’ others, particularly male migrant workers and cultural nationalists, who are made to lie beyond imagined urbane boundaries. The mirroring of exclusions highlights Elaine Scarry’s work on the incommunicability of pain that results, under conditions of neo-liberal and patriarchal social relations, in both women and working-class men being excluded from city spaces.

Urbanizatsiya v umakh: stalinskoe “pravo na gorod”, sovetskaya subektivnost i praktiki grazhdanstva v Khanty-Mansiyske

The article investigates the concept of Stalin’s “right to the city”, in which urbanization in the USSR is interpreted through the lens of Soviet subjectivity and implemented in specific practices of citizenship. In the socialist context, Stalin’s “right to the city” was discursively reproduced as a state-given ‘gift of modernity’ and was reflected in specific citywide events that represented the new Soviet citizens and consolidated the reciprocal connection between power and society through the idea of the city. The city as a gift concluded a civil agreement between the authorities and ordinary people through citywide practices—rallies, celebrations, ceremonies, and competitions, and became a place of activity and emotion for the Soviet citizen. The activists who spoke this discursive language—and participated in the citizenship practices framed by it—thereby acted within the framework of urban subjectivity. In other words, they understood themselves as citizens and accepted the corresponding obligations. The study is based on the case of Khanty-Mansiysk of the 1930s to early 1950s, the district center of the Khanty-Mansi National Okrug. These practices of interaction between citizens and the state make it possible—moving beyond the binary opposition of ideology and reality—to conceptualize Stalin’s “right to the city” as an implicit urbanization in the minds of urban subjects who sought to become full-fledged citizens of the Soviet state. Stalin’s “right to the city” became their civil obligation.

After riots: Toward a research agenda on the long-term effects of urban unrest

ABSTRACT Urban societies are experiencing intensified social frictions which have manifested in a growing occurrence of riots. Urban riots are often treated as ephemeral outbursts which create only short-term or immediate responses by the state or residents. However, this paper aims to move beyond such present-centrism by proposing a research agenda for studying their contextually longer-term legacies. Particular consideration is given to three thematic areas: (a) policy responses, (b) temporalities and urban memory, and (c) feelings and subjectivities. Drawing upon empirical illustrations concerning riots in London (2011) and Stockholm (2013), the paper uncovers variations within and across the two cities, such as differing state and private sector interventions; reshaping of civil society; and how residents variously resist, adapt to, and promote change. The paper thus reflects upon how riots’ afterlives in different urban contexts are constructed, mobilized and contested. Such variations point to the importance of the situated study of urban riots’ diverse legacies.

Urban space-making through protests

In the last decade, the world has seen a surge of protests and social movements. Also in Turkey, a group of protesters occupied the Gezi Park in 2013 against the government’s plans to transform it into a commercial complex. This paper explores the protests to advance knowledge on the relationship between urban space and protests. The paper argues that first; Gezi Park reflects variegated ‘rights of, in and to the city’ created through ‘commoning’. Second, the Park becomes a ‘socio-spatial-virtual bricolage,’ which contains past and present, traditional and contemporary and global and local subjects, elements and activities and different realms such as the physical and the virtual. Finally, the paper argues that the Park reflects a new political urban space and subjectivity.

Experience as Tactic: Playing Along with Developmental Urbanism in the Urban South

Experience as Tactic:Playing Along with Developmental Urbanism in the Urban South John Zarobell (bio) AbdouMaliq Simone. Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South. Cambridge: Polity, 2018. 120 pp. $15.99 (pb). ISBN: 9781509523399 This slender volume contains some weighty reflections on a career spent inhabiting and studying cities in the Global South. Like many urban scholars, AbdouMaliq Simone weaves a lot of recent political and social theory into his interpretations of urban experience but what strikes the reader most forcefully is his method. At first, it may seem a bit like wandering yet coheres rhythmically into a kind of provocation, one which challenges not only the apparent coherence of urban development narratives but, even further, the ontology of knowledge around urban subjectivity. As a theoretical intervention, it provides an alternative model for figuring those subalterns who do in fact speak but cannot reasonably be spoken for. By following geographic and temporal disjunctions and re-articulations, Simone investigates those people who inhabit the areas society deems uninhabitable and explores an ethics of care not from a perspective of law or class, but from the engagements, improvisations and rhythms that make up a peripheral life. There are a handful of central themes explored in this book. Considering them in turn will yield successive layers that underscore the complexity of this book. He opens with "districting": By districting, I mean a process of creating a platform for operating in the world using a repertoire of available classifications and administrative categories to set out a terrain that is then turned into something that exceeds all efforts to definitively pin it down, to contain what it can do. This surfeit of experience provides the opportunity for residents to write themselves into a milieu that otherwise might seem to marginalize them and their way of doing things. (5) [End Page 1138] Needless to say, such a conception owes a lot to poststructuralist theory and this sounds a bit like bricolage. By way of genealogy, one can perceive traces of Levi-Strauss, de Certeau, as well as Deleuze and Guattari and their followers, Hardt and Negri. That said, it is impossible not to notice the ways that Black thinkers animate this volume in order to articulate of the dynamics of contemporary urban life. The book opens with a discussion of concepts developed by Katherine McKittrick and Fred Moten and districting, as discussed above, relates directly to the dynamic of subjugation. But there is something slippery about Simone's conception here. If a district is a bound space, whether physically or conceptually, how can districting exceed efforts to pin it down? Experience seems to be a tactic—in Gramsci's sense—to evade the pattern of social and political marginalization among the dispossessed. What is more, the container of this experience who performs this half-step is not named by Simone as a subject per se because, to be blunt, the whole notion of subjectivity is proved by this population to be utterly irrelevant. Their capacity as political subjects is marginal at best, so Simone has devoted enormous energy over the course of his career to theorize what the alternative to an urban subject might be for a denizen of what he terms the "Urban South." The next concept, "Ensemble Work" is demonstrated through a remarkable series of vignettes, some of which recount a personal history, so his model becomes both autobiographical and multidimensional. Once again, it is hard to conceive what ensemble work means exactly to his theory because his thinking and presentation are decidedly non-linear. By now, the reader will have realized that there is something fundamentally anti-systematic in his approach and his alternative, derived from jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, is harmolodics. As the author explains, "Harmolodic modulation is the method of moving the same notes-as-written from one clef to another in order to yield various names accompanied by a parallel modulation where the same notes are played on different instruments in order to realize various sounds" (35). Names and sounds are indeed what Chapter 2 yields: place names such as Jakarta, Free Town, Naples, Chicago, and Les Abricots (Haiti). The "sounds" that emerge are conceptual placeholders such as...

“You Rise Up … They Burn You Again”: Market fires and the urban intimacies of disaster colonialism

In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus on a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumours suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐centre land. Concerned less with the veracity of these rumours and more with their political ecologies, we show how narratives of Park Yard forwarded by the state and private interests indeed readied it for disaster. Here, we trace how colonial narratives of urban planning in the city, driven by technocratic imperatives of improvement, modernisation, and safety echo in the contemporary devaluation of Park Yard and its women traders. Against this, we show how the caring labour and investment by those traders was central to the formation and maintenance of the market. Over time they created an economically viable space, even as their work was devalued and legally unrecognised. Our analysis interrogates the colonial past‐presents and the gendered‐racialised logics of neoliberal urban development. This framing understands spectacular disaster, a series of highly destructive fires, as inextricably connected to historically produced systems of precarious urban marginality. It demonstrates the uneven impacts, and in particular the deeply deleterious impacts for low‐income Ugandan women; the relationship between fire disaster, vulnerability, and the labour of social reproduction; and the varied ways female traders resisted, adapted, and struggled to defend their economic space in the city. Specifically, a feminist political ecology also helps us understand the embodied nature of this relationship. That is, it is always produced through emotion‐laden, material, and corporeal gendered, racialised and classed power and both relies on and violates particular kinds of idealised or disposable urban subjectivities.

What does “Global” in “Global Indian” mean?: cultural production and new urban subjectivities in world-class Mumbai

ABSTRACT Through an examination of the stand-up comedy scene in Mumbai, India, this paper analyzes what “global” means in the context of new articulations of Indian-ness. I argue that emergent urban art forms, such as stand-up comedy in Mumbai, allow the articulation of a world-class urban subjectivity, which comes to define meanings of “global Indian-ness”. Thus, this article contributes to our understanding of how the growing role of global cities in capturing transnational flows of capital shapes contemporary articulations of national identity. Specifically, media productions facilitated by the production of cities like Mumbai as world-class produces a new subjectivity that informs national identity. Stand-up comedy in Mumbai is one such emergent media production, because it is made possible by Mumbai’s media infrastructure, which in turn is facilitated by the reorganization of Mumbai as a world-class city.

Urban subjects: Somali claims to recognition and urban belonging in Eastleigh, Nairobi

ABSTRACT After more than a century of mutually constructed strangerhood, relations between the Somali community and the Kenyan state are strained. Following the concomitant developments of the devolution of power, an influx of refugees and a growing securitisation discourse, Somalis in Kenya today take up an ambiguous position between marginalisation and increasing political and economic visibility (Carrier & Lochery 2013; Scharrer 2018; Weitzberg 2017). Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in Eastleigh, Nairobi, I will show how contemporary narratives of belonging and contribution are being presented by the Somali community on a variety of platforms. I will discuss the role of taxation in historical as well as contemporary claims to recognition and the significance of taking claims to formal Kenyan courts. I argue that these diverse practices all serve to create an urban Somali subjectivity in Kenya, as they seek to constitute Eastleigh as a central urban space from where the Somalis can make claims on the Kenyan state.

The antarctica photography of Adriana Lestido

During early 2012, the Argentine photographer Adriana Lestido spent two months undertaking photography on the Argentine Peninsula of Antartica. Hers is the first systematic photography of the region, and it demonstrates the attempt to capture visually the fully range of that landscape. Our customary imaginary of the Antarctic landscape is very impoverished, one of ice and white snow, with some scattered fauna. Lestido’s systematic project reveals, by contrast, complex patterns of shifting climatic process and how shadow and light are far more complex than the conventional imaginary holds. A Guggenheim Foundation fellow, Lestido, who is known for her uncompromising photography of urban feminist social subjectivity, has, in a new phase of her work, turned to landscape photography and her Antarctica photographs constitute an highly original artistic undertaking to visualize how we might expand our understanding of the natural environment.

Water governmentalities: The shaping of hydrosocial territories, water transfers and rural–urban subjects in Latin America

With increasing water consumption and pollution in cities and expanding urban areas, impacts on rural areas as water extraction and waste disposal zones are intensifying. To unravel these hydro-territorial dynamics, this paper studies the intersecting and overlapping Foucauldian ‘arts of government’ (‘governmentalities’) deployed to convey water from rural to urban areas in three Latin American cities: Lima (Peru), San Luis Potosí (Mexico) and Bucaramanga (Colombia). We examine conventional (cemented) water transfers, broadly promoted payment for ecosystem services schemes and their conjunction, combining scholarship about hydrosocial territories and governmentality. We demonstrate how particular urban-based imaginaries about rural areas, their inhabitants, norms, practices and identities become embedded in governmentality schemes, and how these are justified, materialized and sustained, producing particular entwined rural–urban subjectivities. We explore how these are accepted, negotiated or contested. Our application of the governmentalities framework to analyze the material and socio-political effects of rural–urban water transfers contributes to existing scholarship on the (re)shaping of rural–urban hydrosocial territorialities showing the ‘hidden’ and ‘invisible’ workings of subjectification. It also contributes to the literature on governmentalities by scrutinizing the importance of technology (including physical infrastructure) in creating rural subjects.

Reciprocal Repossession: Property as Land in Urban Australia

AbstractRepossession of land by Indigenous people is commonly understood as a legal act that unfolds within the confines of state apparatuses. But for many Indigenous urbanites, legal repossession is both impossible and irrelevant due to their histories of dispossession and dislocation. Moreover, while land repossession in Australia is predominantly non‐urban, I demonstrate that land is also reclaimed within cities. Urban repossession of land, considered here as reciprocal rather than legal, challenges the model of private ownership by asserting a territorially transferable relationship to property as land. The order of property entrenches Indigenous people's dispossession by demanding immobility as precondition to ownership and rendering Indigenous urbanites all “too mobile”. Against this framing and the liquidation of their lands as capital, Indigenous people practice reciprocal forms of repossession that challenge both liberal and traditional meanings of ownership. This helps retrieve urban Indigenous subjectivities while compelling partial relinquishment of non‐Indigenous properties.

Sharing cities: creating space and practice for new urban agency, capacities and subjectivities

ABSTRACTIn recent years, cities across the world have witnessed the emergence of alternative economic practices that have come to challenge norms related to production and consumption. Although a plethora of research has started to emerge on this sharing economy, less attention has been paid to community-led and potentially transformative sharing practices that prioritize peer-to-peer collaboration, equity, and increasing social capital above financial benefits. Following the work of a community-based initiative Share Sydney, this research seeks to understand practices of communal sharing as they emerge in the City of Sydney, Australia. Drawing analysis particularly from the group’s Sharing Map project, we explore how communal sharing initiatives like Share Sydney are constituting sharing practice and seeking to develop new kinds of urban agency, capacities, and subjectivities that may feed progressive community development towards more socially just and environmentally sustainable Sharing Cities.

Interpellation and Urban transformation: Lisbon’s sardine subjects

ABSTRACT Many cities have tried to reinvent themselves, but what role can new material and symbolic traditions play in urban transformations? Here we interrogate how ideology can be spread through a new tactile motif. Geographical work has focused on state-led, event and architecture-based development projects that drive change in the city. We suggest that the aesthetic, the sensory and the behavioural can also be fields through which urban change is driven. In Lisbon the sardine has emerged as a moniker for the city. An informal coalition of state and non-state interests have deployed the sardine to interpellate urban subjectivity, effecting processes of consumption and specifically touristification in the city. Building on the idea of interpellation we argue that both sardine symbols and actual sardines have hailed subjects in the city and the behaviours of residents and tourists have modified in response. Although the sardine is not the prime mover in urban transformation, our fieldwork shows how the affects of a new icon produce effects through invented traditions, street festivals and the tourist economy.

‘Situational awareness’: Rethinking security in times of urban terrorism

The emergence of ‘situational awareness’ as a response to the perception of a new terrorism in European cities marks a significant shift in the conceptualization of security. Focusing on a recently introduced German Federal Police programme that trains ordinary officers in their capability to handle ‘complex life-threatening situations of police operation’, the article explores how situational awareness introduces a warrior logic into policing and urban subjectivity and modifies our understanding of security at large. It points us to the limitations of preparedness and concretizes the hitherto elusive call to resilience. Three analytical dimensions – space–time, sensing and connectivity – will be developed to render the situation thinkable for empirical research as well as to grasp security as a ‘live’ mode of government.

The Written Park: Reading Multiple Urban Park Subjectivities Through Signage, Writing, and Graffiti

Urban parkland is a quintessential form of public space. Various actors—from government managers, to civic groups, to individual visitors—actively negotiate and co-create the governance, use, and meaning of parks. One form of negotiation occurs through signage and writing. Here, we focus on 42 parks in New York City and the multiple narratives within them. Through coding the messages, material qualities, and meanings in 784 signs, qualitative analysis of graffiti in parks, triangulated with ethnographic field notes, we identify and discuss what sort of urban park subjectivities are being constructed. These include not only an “ideal park subject,” but also alternative subjectivities such as the neighbor or steward, the graffiti writer, and “free agents” who use wilderness as refuge. We seek to inform new ways of thinking about parks as social–ecological resources that are co-created by users and managers as places that allow multiple subjectivities to be expressed.

Surplus Labor and Subjectivity in Urban Agriculture: Embodied Work, Contested Work

This article examines unpaid work within urban agriculture sites. It focuses on the extra work—the surplus labor—that is performed to sustain these sites and how this work relates to subject formation. Land access and subjectivities are widely discussed in the urban agriculture literature, particularly in the Global North, but recent research has also identified the continual supply of labor as a crucial issue as well. However, work dynamics of urban agriculture have seldom been the object of analysis, and little is known about the relationship between unpaid urban agriculture work and subjectivity. I argue that surplus labor is useful for analysis because of the surplus value that is produced through urban agriculture. I draw on the theoretical framework of diverse economies to examine surplus labor through an antiessentialist form of class analysis. A case study from New Jersey, USA, is based on two years of participant observation and forty-eight interviews in twenty cities. The case study reveals how surplus labor is performed, the techniques used to appropriate and distribute surplus labor, the subject formation that occurs through this surplus labor, and models of surplus food distribution that emerge from the juncture of surplus and subjectivity. Conclusions point to contested work practices and the embodied experience of surplus production as keys to subject formation. More broadly, it sheds light on the processes through which surplus labor is performed in unpaid informal forms of enterprise and the role that subject formation plays in that labor.

Following the Flâneur: The Methodological Possibilities and Applications of Flânerie in New Urban Spaces

This paper considers the historic concept of flânerie, the act of “strolling” through urban spaces, as an unconventional approach to gathering qualitative data. In adopting a flânerie identity, the researcher is able to critically analyze urban spaces and the relation of self to those spaces. Through a (re)conceptualization of the 19th century flâneur, we explicate the methodological possibilities and applications of flânerie, in particular, as suited to excavating new urban tropes, whilst giving expression to new urban subjectivities. The authors adopt a flânerie identity, engaging in a qualitative inquiry vis-à-vis two “strolls” occurring in Toronto, Canada. The strolls provide opportunities to interrogate subjectivities and perceptions of the authors in relation to the urban spaces they were traversing. In doing so, this paper emphasizes the legitimacy of adopting a flâneur identity as a valid source of qualitative inquiry; one that is able to bring meaning to spaces and places.