City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-04-02DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70003
Joella Bitter
{"title":"Gathering Cities, Speculating Wind: Listening in Dry Season Gulu","authors":"Joella Bitter","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70003","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>What is the place of the wind in analyses of the city? In late 2016, and into 2017, forceful dry season winds in Gulu, Uganda, provoked frequent commentary. This short ethnographic essay endeavors to think with these winds (of weather and breath) and to speculate their implications for “the city” vis-à-vis its lived, sensory geographies. Using listening methodologies drawn from ethnography, sonic praxis, and Black studies, I consider windy encounters as gatherings of the city in audible movements of air. From these windy attunements emerges a city unsettled by changing seasonal winds, a city that endures, and a city living with wind as relational presence. For each, performed displacements of air enact wind as a situating force amidst unsteady linkages of geography, climate, and urban development. Can winds attune us to ways of unsettling human geographies of enclosure?</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143835902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-04-02DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70007
Matthew DeMaio
{"title":"Accumulating Place: Multiplicities of Movements and Attachments Among Palestinian Refugees From Syria","authors":"Matthew DeMaio","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>When the Syrian Civil War led to the depopulation of the Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp in Damascus, members of the camp's Palestinian refugee community suddenly found themselves facing further rounds of enforced movement. Prompted by this renewed displacement, this article explores how, following a rupture with place, refugees build attachments to new places of refuge and considers what happens when such a rupture is not a single event in the past but an ongoing and repeated process. Drawing on ethnographic research with former Yarmouk residents living in Lebanon, Jordan, Europe, and the United States, I argue that attachments to place emerge through material and immaterial accumulations that arise amid refugees' necessary daily practices of dwelling—a process I term accumulating place. That is, the need to get by in new places requires the accumulation of identity documents, permits, apartments, furnishings, languages, social ties, and beyond. It is through these varied accumulations that attachments to new places of refuge emerge. In exploring the experiences of Yarmouk's former residents, I situate these refugees' contemporary accumulations within the broader history of Palestinian displacement, demonstrating that, for iteratively displaced refugees, attachments to place include but expand beyond the binary of homeland and host country.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143835903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-04-02DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70009
Sebastian Salay, Jennifer Day
{"title":"Overlapping Land Tenure Stories: Ambiguity in Port Vila's Urban Precarity","authors":"Sebastian Salay, Jennifer Day","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Migrants to Port Vila from elsewhere in Vanuatu and the customary owners of the land to which they move make agreements about land tenure. However, land can hold multiple meanings which can both support and undermine attempts to create durable agreements. We apply concepts of ambiguity and urban precarity to land in Vanuatu, which itself is already polysemic, to argue that ni-Vanuatu people perpetuate and negotiate multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings, to fulfill their various interests. Drawing on interviews with migrants and customary land owners, we demonstrate how people can benefit from a social context that allows for multiple narratives to coexist, even when they appear to contradict each other. However, this anthropology of ambiguity shows how it can also create new ways for disputes to occur and for powerful people to assert control.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.70009","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143835904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-03-28DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70006
Paola Andrea Sánchez Castañeda
{"title":"“There is No Territory to Sow”: Urban Coloniality of Nature and Muysca Dwelling","authors":"Paola Andrea Sánchez Castañeda","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70006","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Indigenous communities in urban environments experience unique and enduring forms of colonialism. In the city of Bogota, Colombia, the Indigenous Muysca community of Suba experiences urban coloniality through various mechanisms such as displacement, environmental degradation, and epistemicide. Despite having their traditional territories abruptly urbanized, the Muysca engage in embodied practices of contestation through language revitalization, urban gardening, and the occupation of sacred places that have become urbanized. Drawing on ethnographic research with the Muysca of Suba framed within the Participatory Action Research methodology, I explore dwelling as an embodied, everyday experience rooted in place to illuminate the processes through which the Muysca interact with their environment to produce alternative socioecological lifeworlds in the city. These alternative ways of relating to the environment, which I refer to as Muysca dwelling, challenge the logic of the urban coloniality of nature that continues to drive Indigenous dispossession through urban development. By highlighting how the Muysca's embodied practices of dwelling unsettle technologies of urban coloniality of nature, I demonstrate how urban Indigenous temporalities and ontologies are cultivated within the city and reflect alternative processes of Indigenous revitalization and socioecological relations.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143836388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-03-28DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70005
Joella Bitter, Bettina Ng'weno
{"title":"Unsettling the City, Sedimentations of Place","authors":"Joella Bitter, Bettina Ng'weno","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70005","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Building on an anthropology of the city, this special section aims to further pry open “the city” by tarrying with the material and sensorial relationships that accrue between cities and their residents even while hanging in suspension/motion. Through these concerns with the material and the sensorial, we contribute to the emergent anthropological conversation about the ways in which the felt textures of place matter to the city, atmospherically, temporally, affectively, and infrastructurally. In attending to city-as-relation, we wish also to interrogate “the city” for the ways it continues to be undergirded by modernity as a colonial, racialized project and how its contemporary formations are everyday saturated with the afterlives of this past. Papers in this special section foreground the practices through which residents relate to the city while living through interplays of fixity and flux, suffusions of toxicity and joy, dispersals of memory and sense, and accumulations of labor and infrastructure. The section draws together scholars experimenting with writing craft/form as well as with uncertain modes of ethnographic attunement. They call attention to the multiple ways in which the city unsettles and is unsettled physically and conceptually by sedimentations of place.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143836387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-03-24DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70002
Josiane Carine Tantchou
{"title":"“Living in the City, You Can End Up With the City Living in You”: Urban Struggles and Mental Health in Accra, Ghana","authors":"Josiane Carine Tantchou","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70002","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper examines the intersection of city life and mental health in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews and focus group discussions, it explores how urban precarity, infrastructural violence, and uncertainty in a rapidly shifting world contribute to mental distress. The findings highlight that urban precarity, passive infrastructural violence, and individual identity—encompassing personality, available opportunities, navigation of these opportunities based on qualifications and support, and perceptions by others—are central to processes leading to mental unease or breakdown. By emphasizing local perspectives, this paper underscores the importance of understanding the unique links between urban living and mental health in African cities. It advocates for a multidisciplinary approach that bridges global frameworks with the sociopolitical and infrastructural realities of urban Africa, offering fresh insights into the mental health challenges faced by those living on the margins of what Peter Sloterdijk has called the <i>Palais de cristal</i>.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.70002","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143836375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-03-24DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70004
Bettina Ng'weno
{"title":"Building Newness in Fits and Starts: Infrastructure and Temporality in Nairobi","authors":"Bettina Ng'weno","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70004","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Nairobi is a rapidly changing city. The speed, magnitude, and unpredictability of the change are productive of a kind of unsettling. This unsettling is felt in the sound of drilling, the texture of the constant dust, the sight of cranes, and the unevenness of uplifted sidewalks. At the same time, as the sound, dust, and cranes persist across the city from day into night from 1 year to the next, this change is also productive of a kind of sedimentation, a resettling of the unsettling, a certainty of uncertainty and upheaval. How can we understand the processes of simultaneous rapid change and waiting taking place in Nairobi, and what are ways of thinking about the temporality of these processes? I posit an analytic of repeated fits and starts whose speed or lack of speed unsettles. In addition, I posit the temporal concept of sedimentation, or the accumulation of destruction/construction layered on top of each other, producing a repetitive pattern of rushing followed by waiting. As such, Nairobi, I argue, is constituted as much by unsettling as it is by sedimentation.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.70004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143836376","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-03-10DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70000
Yun Emily Wang
{"title":"(Un)settling Ears","authors":"Yun Emily Wang","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70000","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This short-form ethnographic sketch juxtaposes the narratives of sound, listening, and the idea of “home” from two Taiwanese “astronaut wives” who had immigrated to Toronto. Both women's daily lives were suffused with the absences of their husbands (remaining in Asia to earn money) and adult children, and both regularly shuttled trans-pacifically, and so had never fully emplace. I show their contrasting accounts of how drastically different sounds constitute Toronto for each of them, in relation to their respective sonic Taipeis. In tracing their differently (un)settling ears that destabilized both cities, I also show how such unsettlement gave them language to articulate otherwise unspeakable alienations in their seemingly heteronormative and privileged lives. In contrast to the Sound Studies' overwhelming tendency to understand listening as emplacement, by overdubbing these two narratives, I show aural ways of being that are marked by disorientations and suspension between places.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143836007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2025-03-07DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70001
Stephen Sullivan
{"title":"“‘Can You Hear Me?’: Virtual Noisemaking in the Pandemic (New York) City”","authors":"Stephen Sullivan","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.70001","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How did urban residents use noise to stage digital protests during the pandemic? This article focuses on online “cacerolazos,” noise demonstrations by New York City housing organizers and tenants demanding rent cancellation during spring 2020. I analyze rent cancellation cacerolazos as assemblages of sonic and digital practices that enabled tenants to narrativize and contest economic conditions and to build solidarity during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cacerolazos were conducted primarily on online platforms due to health concerns and limitations for public gatherings implemented by state officials. Participants used noisemaking to demand renter protections, foster community, and call attention to precarious housing. By analyzing digital archival and ethnographic data, I examine how the affordances of virtual space differently enabled and constrained the recognition and uptake of cacerolazos as a protest form in the United States. I also situate pandemic-era cacerolazos within longer, interrelated genealogies of Latin American protest and dissensual noisemaking projects conducted on the internet. The cacerolazos' limited reach in early pandemic politics emblematized existing racial and economic inequalities that sedimented during the unfolding crisis in the city.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ciso.70001","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143836215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}