Blue lines and blues infrastructures: Notes on water, race, and space

In Detroit, Michigan, the urban poor fear they are being displaced and replaced by water. As part of the city’s recent redevelopment efforts, planners have proposed creating green and blue infrastructure zones to manage urban flooding and mitigate the volume of overflow storm and sewer waters that pollute the Great Lakes each year. The areas slated for these water retention zones are the same marginal neighborhoods where Black residents face frequent foreclosures due to water debts and mass shutoffs from water and sewer services. This paper explores how water materializes and mediates uneven landscapes of livability, as well as new modes of living in common among those excluded from the urban commons. I introduce the concepts of “bluelining” and “blues infrastructures” in order to think through the contested assemblages of water, race, and space at the margins of urban life.

Download Full-text

Urban climate change, livelihood vulnerability and narratives of generational responsibility in Jinja, Uganda

Africa ◽

10.1017/s0001972017000547 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 88 (1) ◽

pp. 11-37 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Katie McQuaid ◽

Robert M. Vanderbeck ◽

Gill Valentine ◽

Chen Liu ◽

Lily Chen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Urban Poor ◽

Global Climate ◽

Qualitative Interviews ◽

Urban Climate ◽

Urban Life ◽

Future Generations ◽

Economic Changes ◽

Weather Patterns ◽

Present Generation

AbstractThere is an urgent need to understand lived experiences of climate change in the context of African cities, where even small climate shocks can have significant implications for the livelihoods of the urban poor. This article examines narratives of climate and livelihood changes within Jinja Municipality, Uganda, emphasizing how Jinja's residents make sense of climate change through their own narrative frames rather than through the lens of global climate change discourses. We demonstrate how the onset of climate change in Jinja is widely attributed to perceived moral and environmental failings on the part of a present generation that is viewed as both more destructive than previous generations and unable to preserve land, trees and other resources for future generations. A focus on local ontologies of climate change highlights how the multiple, intersecting vulnerabilities of contemporary urban life in Jinja serve to obfuscate not only the conditions of possibility of an immediate future, but the longer-term horizons for future generations, as changing weather patterns exacerbate existing challenges people face in adapting to wider socio-economic changes and rising livelihood vulnerability. This form of analysis situates changing climate and environments within the context of everyday urban struggles and emphasizes the need for civic participation in developing climate change strategies that avoid the pitfalls of climate reductionism. The article draws on more than 150 qualitative interviews, generational dialogue groups, and creative methods based on research-led community theatre.

Download Full-text

The urban public sector as commons

Focaal ◽

10.3167/fcl.2013.660114 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 2013 (66) ◽

pp. 125-127

Author(s):

Jane Collins

Keyword(s):

Public Sector ◽

Everyday Life ◽

Common Property ◽

Urban Life ◽

Right To The City ◽

Urban Settings ◽

Collective Property ◽

The Right ◽

Urban Commons ◽

The City

Susser and Tonnelat’s article on the three urban commons is both visionary and heartening. Its counterpastoral polemic glorifies urban modes of sociality and the forms of common property fostered by urban life. The authors find in cities communities of experience that cross class lines and create inadvertent coalitions around shared problems. They argue that specific components of what has been called “the right to the city” need to be understood as “commons”—collective property that is neither fully public nor private but shared by individuals as they go about everyday life in urban settings.

Download Full-text

Housing and the Urban Poor: The Case of Bogotá, Colombia

Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs ◽

10.2307/174863 ◽

1977 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 99-124

Author(s):

Timothy O'Dea Gauhan

Keyword(s):

Housing Market ◽

Latin American ◽

Low Income ◽

Urban Poor ◽

Well Being ◽

Urban Life ◽

Political Factors ◽

Industrialized Nations ◽

The Impact ◽

Low Income Housing

In a setting as complex as the modern city we can expect that a number of diverse factors wil combine to influence the urban environment and the quality of life and well being of those who reside in it. In the major cities of the developing world, where change is typically rapid, economic and social relationships are diverse, and the patterns of development are often different and in some ways more complex than those of the cities of industrialized nations, and the forces which shape the character of urban life are particularly numerous and often confusing.The present paper examines a single component of the total environment of the Latin American city of Bogotá, Colombia: the low-income housing market. We begin by looking at some of the more important environmental, socioeconomic, and political factors that have shaped the character of the low-income housing market of the city, with an emphasis on the impact of public policy.

Download Full-text

Transformative cities

Focaal ◽

10.3167/fcl.2013.660110 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 2013 (66) ◽

pp. 105-121 ◽

Cited By ~ 11

Author(s):

Ida Susser ◽

Stéphane Tonnelat

Keyword(s):

Public Space ◽

Capital Accumulation ◽

Social Needs ◽

Urban Life ◽

Mass Communications ◽

Service Workers ◽

Cultural Workers ◽

Community Activists ◽

The Social ◽

Urban Commons

Drawing on Lefebvre and others, this article considers contemporary urban social movements with a selective review of urban research and suggestions for future ethnographic, cultural, and sociological questions. Under a generalized post-Fordist regime of capital accumulation, cultural workers and laborers, service workers, and community activists have all participated in urban movements. We consider such collective action, generated in the crucible of urban life, as a reflection of three urban commons: labor, consumption, and public services; public space (including mass communications and the virtual); and art, including all forms of creative expression. We suggest that the three urban commons outlined here are not necessarily perceived everywhere, but as they momentarily come together in cities around the world, they give us a glimpse of a city built on the social needs of a population. That is the point when cities become transformative.

Download Full-text

The Contours of Female Piety in Later Medieval Hagiography

Church History ◽

10.2307/3166477 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 50 (1) ◽

pp. 20-32 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Michael Goodich

Keyword(s):

Urban Poor ◽

Married Women ◽

Urban Life ◽

Dynamic Changes ◽

Rural And Urban ◽

Political Struggles ◽

Cult Of The Virgin ◽

The City ◽

Female Saints ◽

The Church

The thirteenth century represents a high point in the establishment of female orders, whose ministry was directed largely at an urban population prone to heresy and undergoing the disruptive transition from pastoral feudalism to nascent capitalism. During this period, more than a quarter of the contemporary saints were women; they identified with all of the new movements which animated the church. Some, continuing the already established tradition of princely veneration, were active in evangelization in the recently Christianized regions of Europe's periphery, like Spain and Poland, through the patronage of charitable institutions and religious houses. The canonization trials of Hedwig of Poland, Elizabeth of Thuringia and Margaret of Hungary all reflect a broadly based constituency including rural and urban, lay and clerical, male and female support Others appealed to a narrower social and geographical audience and ministered to the problems of the urban poor: Sperandea of Cingoli's miraculous cures were performed exclusively on married women of the city and of the adjacent countryside. But the largest number of female saints continued to be cloistered women whose chief accomplishment was the establishment or endowment of a new convent or the foundation of a new female order, usually in association with a male order; for while many such orders began independently, the church feared the consequences of independent female piety and sought to ensure orthodoxy by associating the female houses with a corresponding male order. Nevertheless, while contemporary hagiography continued to be patterned after the stereotypical saints of early Christianity, the character of female piety changed to reflect such dynamic changes within the church as the rise of mendicancy, the transition from rural to urban life, the cult of the Virgin, the rise of national states, the war against heresy, the new emphasis on the humanity of Christ and the political struggles of the papacy.

Download Full-text

The Great Lakes

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858897.013.9 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Jill Doerfler ◽

Erik Redix

Keyword(s):

Great Lakes ◽

American Indians ◽

Critical Role ◽

Urban Life ◽

Native People ◽

Treaty Rights ◽

Military Conflict ◽

Indian History ◽

American Indian History ◽

History Of

The experience of Native people in the Great Lakes region is crucial to understanding the larger history of American Indians. The region was (and remains) a microcosm of the experiences of Native peoples in North America. Most major issues in American Indian history either originated in the Great Lakes or have had a corresponding impact, including removal, military conflict, allotment, termination, challenges of urban life, Indian activism, treaty rights, and economic development via gaming. This chapter reviews those events and topics while exploring the central and critical role that relationships have played in the lives and experiences of Native people in the Great Lakes.

Download Full-text