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":"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":0.5,"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 : 2025-03-28DOI: 10.1111/ciso.70008
{"title":"Sonic Signatures: Music, Migration, and the City at Night","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/ciso.70008","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ciso.70008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144815126","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":"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":0.5,"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":"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":0.5,"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":"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":0.5,"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":"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":0.5,"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}
City & SocietyPub Date : 2024-11-15DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12502
Xuyi Zhao
{"title":"A timespace of zero-COVID in Southwest China: Building community, governing time","authors":"Xuyi Zhao","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12502","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ciso.12502","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In this article, I take the organization of universal COVID testing as a point of departure for understanding the lived experiences of China's zero-COVID policy and look at “the Community” (<i>shequ</i>) as a dynamic interface between the state and urban residents during the liminal time of a global pandemic. Drawing on Bryant and Knight's notion of “vernacular timespace” (2019), I analyze the timespace of zero-COVID as a state-regulated future orientation interwoven with collective anticipation of crisis, bureaucratic temporal governance, and contestations over time as a form of agency in everyday life. Instead of assuming a unitary form of present-future relationship that was homogeneous and unchallenged, I argue that the collective anticipation of a public health crisis was constantly shaped, managed, and contested throughout the processes of pandemic community building. This research hopes to enrich reflections on the interplays of time, power, and legitimacy in post-pandemic urban governance.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 3","pages":"160-170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142861560","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 : 2024-11-13DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12500
Marina Peterson
{"title":"Cloud seeding Los Angeles: Elements of an Unsettled City","authors":"Marina Peterson","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12500","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ciso.12500","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In February of 1978, heavy rain brought major flooding to the Los Angeles region. Attention quickly turned to the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, which had activated its cloud seeding program just prior to the storm. This event provides a focal point for examining ways in which the physicality of clouds informs an elemental approach to urbanism that is at once epistemological and material. Suspended vapor or ice crystals that might precipitate or disperse, clouds offer an understanding of ways of being and knowing in motion. The materiality of water, wind, mud, and concrete in Los Angeles comes to matter in ways inflected by that of clouds. Like clouds, these are moving, phase-shifting forms of matter that destabilize and elude modes of classification. As a material form for thinking through phase shifting processes more generally, clouds attune us toward an unsettled city.</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"37 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143835857","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 : 2024-11-13DOI: 10.1111/ciso.12501
Samuel Shearer
{"title":"“This place is fake:” green capitalism and the production of scarcity in Kigali, Rwanda","authors":"Samuel Shearer","doi":"10.1111/ciso.12501","DOIUrl":"10.1111/ciso.12501","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article is about green capitalism, demolition, and the production of housing scarcity in Kigali, Rwanda. It follows Kiyovu cy'abakene—a real place that was near zero-carbon, built with renewable resources, owned and operated by Kigali residents—as it was first reimagined as a rhetorical “slum” and then converted into an actual one by force. And it follows the design and construction of Batsinda Housing estate, a sustainable solution to a fictional “crisis” of inadequate housing in Kigali. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research, I argue that in Kigali, and many cities like it, the destruction of built environments is not only about local elites who wish to demolish “slums” or “informal settlements” to build “world-class” luxury cities. The demolition of neighborhoods and the displacement of people who live there is also done in the service of making new markets for green commodities through the production of scarcity. To manufacture effective demand for green commodities while maintaining their monopoly over what constitutes “sustainable,” Kigali's international teams of managers and consultants must render alternative, ecologically sound, African-owned neighborhoods and building technologies “unsustainable.”</p>","PeriodicalId":46417,"journal":{"name":"City & Society","volume":"36 3","pages":"146-159"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2024-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142861030","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}