Perifèries Urbanes

Presented initially at II COCA, Universitat de Girona, January 2022 as part of the panel on Promise and Failure of Infrastructures

CALL FOR COMMUNICATIONS TO THE 2nd CATALAN CONGRESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY.

Sur Desarrollo Journal. Collaboration of Camila Méndez.

OACU research seminar. Thursday June 3rd at 18.30h.

This conference will take place on May 13th and will be organised by the research groups Perifèries Urbanes and Cultura Popular i Conflicte (ICA).

From September 12 to 14 a conference on urban activism in Harvard will debate on the links between urban struggles and research activities.

Last June 24th four activists for housing were arrested in São Paulo, Brasil, while seventeen others linked to the movement for squatting were put under arrest; fifteen more are threatened of detention. The arbitrariousness of the operation is another signal of the steady drift towards fascism of the state of […]

War and urban renewal mingle
in south-eastern Turkey, where the government wages its war against the kurdish movement also through the demolition of traditional neighborhoods and the displacement of residents in huge public-housing blocks.

Boston has today the highest income divide of the US: evictions invariably hit latinos or afroamerican neighborhoods. City Life / Vida Urbana since the 1970s keeps building a network of mutual aid among those who suffer the consequences of these housing policies, also through the use of theater, rituals, symbols.

The anthropologist Ye LIN invites us to look at the demolition of a neighborhood in Nanjing – very near to the spot in where the Youth Olympic Games were held in 2014. Ye studies the impact on the residents of the whole process, also highlighting how our idea of “community” influences the way we judge this kind of interventions.

What happened to these young men that were so celebrated in 2011, the main actors of the so-called ‘arab springs’? In recent years we only hear news about politicians, leaders, terrorists… but what about normal people, where have they been? The answer is simple: in their neighborhoods. In Hay Hlil, in Oukacha, in Hezbet el Haggana, where there is the same anger and frustration that there was before the protests.

On the occasion of the opening of “Australian ‘Ndrangheta”, webpage of a UCL research group of which our friend Stephen BENNETTS is a member, we propose a series of interesting videos and texts from the other corner of the world, on topics such as the expulsions of Aboriginese from native lands and urban neighborhood as Sydney’s Redfern.

Mindy Fullilove calls “root shock” the trauma suffered by 1600 Afro-American communities displaced from the city centres of the US since 1949. In her book “Root Shock” (2004) she uses the metaphor of transplantation, a trauma after which, if repeated, many plants can’t recover. Even the transition from the pleasure of jazz, born in the old ghettos, to the anger of rap, product of the new peripheries, is a manifestation of root shock; it is a trauma for those who suffer it, and for society as a whole.

We have been long aware that urban planning, in itself, has something to do with colonialism. But we hadn’t still found a perspective so complete as the one developed by the Australian urbanist Libby PORTER, who studies urban planning as an instrument for spatial exclusion of the aboriginal population: urbanism as a complement and continuation of colonization.

As opposed to the orientalist stereotypes depicting Kathmandu (Nepal) as a place out of time and of the world, the social reality of Nepal reveals an admirable vivacity. Artists and intellectuals participate in this debates, contributing to make it a laboratory of postsecularism and “multiple modernities”.