scholarly journals Everyday contours and politics of infrastructure: Informal governance of electricity access in urban Ghana

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110301
Author(s):  
Ebenezer F Amankwaa ◽  
Katherine V Gough
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Electricity Distribution ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Informal Governance ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Governance Practices ◽  
Electricity Access ◽  
Electricity Infrastructure ◽  
Opening Up

This article contributes to shaping the discourse on unequal geographies of infrastructure and governance in the global South, opening up new ways of thinking through politics, practices and modalities of power. Conceptually, informality, governance and everyday urbanism are drawn on to unpack how the formal encounters the informal in ways that (re)configure infrastructure geographies and governance practices. This conceptual framing is empirically employed through an analysis of electricity access in Accra, Ghana, highlighting how residents navigate unequal electricity topographies, engage in self-help initiatives, and negotiate informal networks and formal governance practices. The spatiality of the electricity infrastructure has created inequity and opportunities for exploitation by ‘power-owners’ and ‘power-agents’ who control and manage the electricity distribution network and, in turn, privately supply power. Electricity connections are negotiated, access is monetised and illegality excused on grounds of good-neighbourliness, thereby producing and perpetuating everyday politics of ‘making do’. Community movements, everyday acts of improvisation, and incremental modifications are shown to influence the workings of formal institutions of government and shape uneven power relations and experiences of inequality. Such an understanding of how marginalised residents navigate the electricity topographies of Accra reveals a more nuanced politics of infrastructure access, which reflects the complex realities of hybridised modalities of governance and the multiple everyday dimensions of power that shape urban space. The article concludes that informality should not be recognised as failure but as a sphere of opportunity, innovation and transition.

Encounters Across Borders. Modernist Ideas and Professional Practices in the 1970s Romania

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-420
Author(s):  
Mara Mărginean
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Third World ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Flows ◽  
Professional Practices ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Urban Policies ◽  
European Culture

Building on several international professional meetings of architects organized in Romania or abroad, this article details how various modernist principles, traditionally subsumed to Western European culture, were gradually reinterpreted as an object of policy and professional knowledge on urban space in the second and third world countries. The article analyses the dialogue between Romanian architects and their foreign colleagues. It highlights how these conversations adjusted the hierarchies and power relations between states and hegemonic centres of knowledge production. In this sense, it contributes to the recent research on the means by which the "trans- nationalization of expertise" "transformed various (semi)peripheral states into new centres of knowledge and thus outlines a new analytical space where domestic actions of the Romanian state in the area of urban policies are to be analysed not as isolated practices of a totalitarian regime, but as expressions of the entanglements between industrialization models, knowledge flows and models of territoriality that were not only globally relevant, but they also often received specific regional, national and local forms.

scholarly journals From Crisis to Compensation: Reinventing Identity and Place in the Sideshow and the Laboratory

Humanities ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Elisavet Ioannidou
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Laboratory Experiments ◽  
Individual Identity ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Peripheral Location ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Physical Resemblance

Examining the ambivalent place of the sideshow and the laboratory within Victorian culture and its reimaginings, this essay explores the contradiction between the narratively orchestrating role and peripheral location of the sideshow in Leslie Parry’s Church of Marvels (2015) and the laboratory in NBC’s Dracula (2013–2014), reading these neo-Victorian spaces as heterotopias, relational places simultaneously belonging to and excluded from the dominant social order. These spaces’ impacts on individual identity illustrate this uneasy relationship. Both the sideshow and the laboratory constitute sites of resignification, emerging as “crisis heterotopias” or sites of passage: in Parry’s novel, the sideshow allows the Church twins to embrace their unique identities, surpassing the limitations of their physical resemblance; in Dracula, laboratory experiments reverse Dracula’s undead condition. Effecting reinvention, these spaces reconfigure the characters’ senses of belonging, propelling them to places beyond their confines, and thus projecting the latter’s heterotopic qualities onto the city. Potentially harmful, yet opening up urban space to include identities which are considered aberrant, these relocations envision the city as a “heterotopia of compensation”: an alternative, possibly idealized, space that reifies the sideshow’s and the laboratory’s attempts to achieve greater extroversion and visibility for their liminal occupants, thus fostering neo-Victorianism’s outreach efforts to support the disempowered.

Governance Capacity of the City of Niš, Serbia, in the Spatial Planning Process

2019 ◽  
pp. 0739456X1984456
Author(s):  
Milica Maksić
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Planning ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Planning Model ◽  
Informal Governance ◽  
Governance Capacity ◽  
Planning Models ◽  
Planning Framework ◽  
Governance Practices ◽  
The City

The basic objective of this paper is to research the capacity of local-level governance in Serbia to transform spatial planning practices. The analysis was performed on the case study of the City of Niš, where besides the presence of formal planning instruments, new informal governance practices have emerged. The governance of spatial development was analyzed in relation to three ideal governance models: hierarchy, market, and network, and four planning models: the comprehensive planning model, the negotiative planning model, the neoliberal model, and the collaborative model. The strengths and weaknesses of the institutional and planning framework are defined, and recommendations for improvement are given.

Norm advocacy networks: Nordic and Like-Minded Countries in EU gender and development policy

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ole Elgström
Keyword(s):  
Development Policy ◽  
Interaction Network ◽  
Policy Networks ◽  
Gender And Development ◽  
Informal Networks ◽  
Informal Governance ◽  
Network Characteristics ◽  
Negotiation Strategies ◽  
Eu Foreign Policy ◽  
Concentric Circles

This article investigates the informal networks of Member States that are claimed to be the drivers of EU gender and development policy. The aim is to highlight the negotiation strategies used in gender and development negotiations and to link these to network characteristics. I categorise the characteristics of the Nordic and the like-minded groupings, relying on network theory and investigate their modes of influence. The article is based on interviews with officials at the Permanent Representations and EU institutions in Brussels. My results demonstrate that the Nordics and the Like-Minded Countries constitute informal networks with frequent interaction. Network members share information and coordinate initiatives. The findings show a preference for gradual entrapment and framing rather than shaming and exclusion. The choice of strategies can be linked to network characteristics: the like-minded network is non-formalised and open, and as the ambition is to spread the norms of the like-minded also to reluctant actors, network participants prefer gradual entrapment and traditional diplomatic initiatives before confrontation. Norm promotion normally occurs in concentric circles negotiations, mirroring the layered structure of the network. This article contributes to the literature on informal governance in EU foreign policy by highlighting key strategies used in intra-EU policy networks.

Three recent scenes in the affective life of gentrification in San Francisco’s Polk Gulch

2020 ◽  
pp. 147447402094955
Author(s):  
Damon Scott ◽  
Trushna Parekh
Keyword(s):  
Urban Development ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Brass Band ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gay Bars ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Urban Territory

Drawing on the ‘reparative turn’ in queer feminist scholarship, we situate a commemorative march that took place in late March 2018 in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco as an entry point into the affective conditions of living in and through a period of intensifying urban development. Complete with a brass band, drag queens dressed in mourning, and black banners, participants stopped at the sites of former gay bars and other commercial establishments where they laid wreaths, offered eulogies, and affectively asserted the social and historical significance of these places. Nine months later, we interviewed organizers and participants and analyzed recordings of the event in order to register the sensate conditions that preceded, pervaded, and followed in the wake of the March. In so doing, we unravel the ‘undecidability of the urban’ in which residents call into question the impacts of gentrification. Through our tripartite engagement with the affective contours of the March, we situate the procession less as a discrete ceremonial event to re-inscribe collective memories in urban space or to lay claims to a right to urban territory, than as a momentary effort to work out and through the ongoing, shared feelings of loss in an increasingly unlivable city. By attending to the felt conditions of urban development, we argue for foregrounding shared sentiments as a viable pathway to opening up relief from, if not alternatives to, the ongoing displacements and dispossessions of the neoliberal city.

scholarly journals Parent Abuse: Opening Up a Discussion of a Complex Instance of Family Power Relations

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry Tew ◽  
Judy Nixon
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Family Violence ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Parent Abuse ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
The Way

In the UK, the issue of parent abuse remains an unacknowledged and under-researched form of family violence receiving little recognition within social policy and professional practice. This may in part be due to the way it transgresses conventional notions of family power relations in which children are seen as potential victims but not as perpetrators. In this paper, we develop a framework for analysing the complexity of family power relations and explore how these may inform the context in which parent abuse and victimisation occurs. This may help to inform constructive policy and practice responses to this issue.

scholarly journals « It’s Never Just One Road » : Genga-Idowu et la prostitution dans l’espace urbain de Nairobi

2013 ◽  
pp. 50-56
Author(s):  
Colomba Muriungi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Potential Alternative ◽  
The City

My article is a reading of Genga-Idowu’s Lady in Chains with an intention to show how she attempts to rewrite the presentation of the prostitute figure in a Kenyan urban space by figuring prostitution as an institution that is useful in questioning and revising economic power relations between men and women. Genga-Idowu shows that women can reliably accumulate income from prostitution and emancipate themselves from the economic disadvantages of postcolonial Kenya. I examine specific traits of the prostitute figure and the spaces within the city that this writer utilizes to revise and disavow Kenyan male writers and socio-cultural conception of the prostitute. Thus prostitution will be projected as a business and a potential alternative road that makes women economically powerful and frees them from other kinds of disadvantages that characterize their lives.

scholarly journals Manchester’s Post-punk Heritage: Mobilising and Contesting Transcultural Memory in the Context of Urban Regeneration

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Brunow
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
City Branding ◽  
Creative City ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Heritage Industry

Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different - and often conflicting - stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification struggles. Post-punk ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts & Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester‘s post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of ‘transcultural memory’. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories, sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester’s postpunk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.

scholarly journals The PST Project, Willie Herrón’s Street Mural Asco East of No West (2011) and the Mural Remix Tour: Power Relations on the Los Angeles Art Scene

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-695
Author(s):  
Eva Zetterman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
East Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Group ◽  
Standard Time ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
Conceptual Performance

This article departs from the huge art-curating project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980, a Getty funded initiative running in Southern California from October 2011 to April 2012 with a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. One of the Pacific Standard Time (PST) exhibitions was Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, running from September to December 2011 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This was the first retrospective of a conceptual performance group of Chicanos from East Los Angeles, who from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s acted out critical interventions in the politically contested urban space of Los Angles. In conjunction with the Asco retrospective at LACMA, the Getty Foundation co-sponsored a new street mural by the Chicano artist Willie Herrón, paying homage to his years in the performance group Asco. The PST exhibition program also included so-called Mural Remix Tours, taking fine art audiences from LACMA to Herrón’s place-specific new mural in City Terrace in East Los Angeles. This article analyze the inclusion in the PST project of Herrón’s site-specific mural in City Terrace and the Mural Remix Tours to East Los Angeles with regard to the power relations of fine art and critical subculture, center and periphery, the mainstream and the marginal. As a physical monument dependent on a heavy sense of the past, Herrón’s new mural, titled Asco: East of No West, transforms the physical and social environment of City Terrace, changing its public space into an official place of memory. At the same time, as an art historical monument officially added to the civic map of Los Angeles, the mural becomes a permanent reminder of the segregation patterns that still exist in the urban space of Los Angeles.

The Prevailing Disease: Foucault on the Institutional Meaning of Epidemics and Compact Models of Power Relations

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compact Models ◽  
Complex Relationships

The article focuses on Michel Foucault’s work with the social history of medicine and evaluates its potential for analyzing the political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foucault reveals the bond between quarantine measures in European cities and the gradual perfection of techniques of power. He uses organized anti-epidemic activities applied to leprosy and plague as examples of “compact models” of power relations that he discusses in terms of exclusion and discipline. He reveals complex relationships between the physical body of an individual and what he calls the “social body” of a state. Foucault describes how “health policy” was formed during the second half of 18th century when it drastically changed urban space and became one of the key techniques of government. In Foucault’s lectures published as Security, Territory, Population, he turns to the concept of a “prevailing” or literally “reigning” disease. The countermeasures against the disease enable the development of special techniques applicable to the population in a given historical period. He uses the statistical description of patients suffering from smallpox as an example of how a regime of power and government of the population develops by invoking security and risk assessment. In the concluding section, the author estimates the potential of Foucauldian historical analysis as a tool for anticipating the tendencies inherent in the techniques of power mobilized to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

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