Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937269
Camila Pierobon
{"title":"Battle for Housing and Mutual Witnessing","authors":"Camila Pierobon","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937269","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937269","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reflects on the dangers related to the circulation and displacement of the urban poor in Brazil, which intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. The author describes a moment when Black women with small children asked for permission from the leadership of a local drug trafficking group to invade the empty rooms of the Nelson Mandela Occupation in downtown Rio de Janeiro, a common practice in the dispute for housing. However, suddenly there was a transformation in the logic of invasions. Rooms where single men lived became targets of dispute generating displacements between houses and cities. These practices are embedded in an intense and widespread network of mutual witness, placing questions of class, race, aging, and gender, as well as the power of criminal groups, in the same web of relationships. The author argues that local relations and mutual witnessing act in this continuum that is city-making in connection with uncertainty and opacity.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41580182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937396
Mahdi Sabbagh
{"title":"Sumud","authors":"Mahdi Sabbagh","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937396","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay aims to identify methods and strategies used to manipulate the Palestinian urban fabric. First, the essay will focus on Israeli settler-colonial activity through a study of the deployed tactics of de-development, destruction, and harassment. Second, it will focus on Silwan's popular movements and their culture of resistance. Instead of viewing their resistance as reactionary or as an act of survival, the essay attempts to frame it as an active praxis. Silwan's collective movement's various means of manipulation—sumud, communal awareness, outreach, and the sit-in tent—form a powerful set of resistance tactics that embody possibly universal lessons in urban resilience.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45685446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937424
R. Gupte, Prasad Shetty
{"title":"small forces","authors":"R. Gupte, Prasad Shetty","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937424","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay discusses cities as composites of small forces of energetic selves. Energetic self here is the dimension of the self that drives one to undertake activities connected to one's desires. These could include collecting strange objects, achieving mundane targets, opposing new ideas, behaving like a spy, counting every tree, tracking obscure data, occupying obscure spaces, and so on. Energetic selves also express themselves in everyday friendships and compassions. These practices go beyond the acts of routine and are considered unproductive in conceptualizing cities. They remain small and are often discarded as stray individual preoccupations, anecdotes, or subjective obsessions. While some of these are related to earnings and occupations, others are simply “useless.” However, everyone seems to have a trip that one lives with and for, and which provides individuals with their energies and cities with their oneiric spaces. Such energies, expressed in absurd quests, unusual obsessions, and bizarre interests cumulatively appear to be producing the city. In many ways the city seems to be a madhouse and madness seems to be running it. The city seems to acquire its generative energy from such small forces. Urban theory and pedagogy have however seldom engaged with an understanding of these small forces or extended it for speculative or projective purposes. Spatial professionals often take up the burden of acting like and being the modern state, which has to operate through modern imperatives of empiricism, technolegality, property regimes, boundaries, and so on. But while these imperatives are limited in understanding life, they are also not completely capable of handling the complexities of the urban. The paper further discusses a variety of ideas like settling; semi-fictional stories and montages; the blur; and transactional capacities to rethink the ways in which one could articulate newer ways to engage with the city.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46946167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937227
K. Easterling
{"title":"Other Than “The City”","authors":"K. Easterling","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937227","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937227","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43746894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937339
ANDREA R ROBERTS, Valentina Aduen, Jennifer Blanks, Schuyler Carter, Kendall Girault
{"title":"Digital Juneteenth","authors":"ANDREA R ROBERTS, Valentina Aduen, Jennifer Blanks, Schuyler Carter, Kendall Girault","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937339","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 After Juneteenth, formerly enslaved African Americans in Texas founded hundreds of historic Black settlements known as freedom colonies. Later, freedom colonies’ populations dispersed, physical traces disappeared, and memories of locations vanished as descendants passed away. In the absence of buildings and legally recognized borders, intangible heritage—stories, ephemeral traditions—define a sense of place. Betraying the perception that these places have disappeared, founders’ descendants express commitments to freedom colonies by returning periodically to plan commemorative events, rehabilitate historic structures, and steward cemeteries. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project (The TXFC Project), a team of faculty and student researchers, documents settlements while supporting descendant communities’ historic preservation aims. By making diasporic publics legible and increasing the visibility of communities’ settlement patterns and remaining extant features, The TXFC Project elevates stakeholders’ concerns in urban planning domains. In 2020, COVID-19’s social distancing requirements challenged diasporic descendants’ efforts to foster social cohesion. Consequently, The TXFC Project hosted a Facebook Live “talk show,” leveraging social media platforms to amplify freedom colony descendants’ work. The team analyzed event transcripts revealing cultural adaptations to socially restrictive conditions during Juneteenth commemorations and indicating that virtual storytelling helped territorialize widely dispersed, unbounded places for stakeholders facing natural and human-made disruptions.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41598362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937382
M. Samdub
{"title":"Governance Interface","authors":"M. Samdub","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937382","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Modi's India, a host of indices perform transparency, efficiency, and good governance but leave undeclared the political shifts they are bringing about. Dramatized in real-time dashboards, policy briefs, press reports, and social media posts, these technocratic numbers arbitrarily rank administrative units and place them in a competitive relation with each other within Indian federalism. As technical device, aesthetic projection, and mediating interface, the index is a node in “maximum governance,” an emergent apparatus of governance that renders development as the site of a pernicious combination of centralizing state power and neoliberal entrepreneurship.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47663146","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937255
E. Crane
{"title":"The Poisoned Periphery","authors":"E. Crane","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937255","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937255","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay develops the idea of the “suburban periphery”: a place of municipal and imperial dirty work, produced by circulations and dispossessions across scale. Homestead, Florida, a suburb of Miami, is home to a military base, a detention camp for migrant children, agricultural industries, and a nuclear power plant. The essay offers methodological reflections for the study of this socio-spatial formation, paying particular attention to how race becomes material through uneven exposure to hazard and to collaborative knowledge production with movements for environmental and migrant justice.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42599978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Public CulturePub Date : 2022-10-31DOI: 10.1215/08992363-9937410
Kim Gurney, N. Muyanga, E. Pieterse
{"title":"The Creative Politics of Legibility","authors":"Kim Gurney, N. Muyanga, E. Pieterse","doi":"10.1215/08992363-9937410","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9937410","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This conversation among a trio of interdisciplinary practitioners moves nimbly between a palace, a shed, and a kitchen—with a trickster spider as totem. Reflections on a new opera based in African folklore produced as a multimodal collaboration in Europe extends to the DIY-DIT principles of independent art spaces and the backyard appeal of a tiny space for big ideas, and concludes with a thought experiment for a new kind of urban incubator that might better attend to the stubbornly nested complexities of the city the contributors all call home: Cape Town, South Africa. The conceptual flies caught in their dialogic web include building new infrastructures to sustain polyvocal vocabularies, the necessary art of burning down and building up, opting for messy over linear time, and coming with your hands full to instantiate multimodal platforms of making.","PeriodicalId":47901,"journal":{"name":"Public Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47849761","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}