Precarious city: home-making and eviction in Buenos Aires, Argentina

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Solange Muñoz

This article expands on current conceptualizations and applications of precarity by exploring the everyday socio-spatial complexities of migrant squatters living in informal hotels in the center of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Through ethnographic methods, this research investigates squatters’ practices of negotiating access to shared domestic spaces and resources, while experiencing long-term waiting for eviction from their home and potentially from the city center. Employing a cultural geographies approach, this work is concerned with understanding the ways in which precarity is routinely experienced in the micro-spaces of everyday life. Precarity is examined in its temporal and spatial manifestations, with particular emphasis on gendered experiences and home-making practices. Moving through daily spaces and routine situations, I document how precarity is embedded in the mundane tasks of the domestic, and as a result, unevenly impacts women whose traditional roles as mothers and caretakers mean that they are often at the fore of place-making practices and responsibilities.

2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Hyler

Helsingborg, a coastal city in southern Sweden, initiated a long-term re-development project called H+ in 2009, aiming to convert industrial harbor space in the city’s south into a new, livable urban neighborhood and city center. The project aims to create an open and ’tolerant city’ in Helsingborg over the next twenty years. In 2010-2011, H+ used an open-source planning method as a strategy to incorporate multiple working methods and ideas into the planning process. As a cultural analyst, my role with the H+ project and the City of Helsingborg was to mediate social and cultural perspectives and development strategies between plan-ners and citizens. Focusing the project’s vision towards incorporating existing communities and their values, I applied an ethnographic method to culturally map Helsingborg’s social cityscapes. Cultural mapping integrates social and physical places into one map. It is a useful methodological tool in accessing ’cultural’ knowledge, translating ethnographic data into usable maps for city planners in the process of developing the H+ area. This article addresses how ethnographic meth-ods and cultural mapping engages with and revitalizes city planning, essentially a process of place-making the H+ area. An applied cultural analytical approach provokes planning practices and questions how and if planning can be more open and inclusive through deeper understandings of unique places that emerge from the relationships between people and spaces. The ’invisible,’ yet well-known, segregating line (a street called Trädgårdsgatan) in Helsingborg creates a particular condition that the city must contend with in order to achieve its vision of a ’toler-ant city.’


Author(s):  
Karen Ahlquist

This chapter charts how canonic repertories evolved in very different forms in New York City during the nineteenth century. The unstable succession of entrepreneurial touring troupes that visited the city adapted both repertory and individual pieces to the audience’s taste, from which there emerged a major theater, the Metropolitan Opera, offering a mix of German, Italian, and French works. The stable repertory in place there by 1910 resembles to a considerable extent that performed in the same theater today. Indeed, all of the twenty-five operas most often performed between 1883 and 2015 at the Metropolitan Opera were written before World War I. The repertory may seem haphazard in its diversity, but that very condition proved to be its strength in the long term. This chapter is paired with Benjamin Walton’s “Canons of real and imagined opera: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1810–1860.”


2008 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
AbdouMaliq Simone

Abstract:In contemporary urban Africa, the turbulence of the city requires incessant innovation that is capable of generating new ways of being. Rather than treating popular culture as some distinctive sector, this article attempts to investigate the popular as methods of bringing together activities and actors that on the surface would not seem compatible, and as experimental forms of generating value in the everyday life of urban residents. This investigation, sited largely in Douala, Cameroon, looks at how youth from varying neighborhoods attempt to get by, and at the unexpected forms of contestation that can ensue.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariana Borukova ◽  
Vladimir Kotev

Education is an activity requiring lengthy efforts and perseverance, as well as skills for acquiring information and its creative usage. All this is based on prolonged motivation, directly related to the improvement of the educational development and the consecutive professional realization. Long-term objectives serve as coordinating terms leading to particular goals in the everyday life and thus, behaviour could be rationalized and directed in a longer prospective towards both the past and the future. The aim of the present study is to survey the opinion and personal assessment of the long-term motivation of students from NSA “Vassil Levski”, Sofia and students from Nish, Serbia. The research was conducted from November 2016 to May 2017. It was done among 96 students (45 fourth-year students at NSA and 51 students from the University in Nish). The students had to fill out a test consisting of 10 questions related to their personal assessment of their long-term motivation. The results of the study were processed mathematically and statistically by: variation analysis, relative share, comparative analysis of two independent samples and comparative analysis of the frequency distributions with χ² – the Pearson criterion.According to the generalized conclusions, a higher percentage of the Bulgarian students is directed towards long-term objectives and prospects than the percentage of the Serbian students. Women are more motivated in their long-term development than men but there are not statistically significant differences along all the questions. Athletes’ motivation is higher than the average one for the whole population. We believe, however, that the motivation changes in the course of the studies and we assume it is higher for the students who are about to graduate.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 218-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Koziura

This article is part of the special cluster titled Bukovina and Bukovinians after the Second World War: (Re)shaping and (re)thinking a region after genocide and ‘ethnic unmixing’, guest edited by Gaëlle Fisher and Maren Röger. This article explores ways in which Habsburg nostalgia has become an important factor in contemporary place-making strategies in the city of Chernivtsi, Western Ukraine. Through the analysis of diasporic homecomings, city center revitalization, and nationalist rhetoric surrounding the politics of monuments, I explore hybrid and diverse ways in which Habsburg nostalgia operates in a given setting. Rather than a static and homogenous form of place attachment, in Chernivtsi different cultural practices associated with Habsburg nostalgia coexist with each other and depending on the political context as well as the social position of the “nostalgic agents” manifest themselves differently. Drawing from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that in order to fully understand individuals’ attachment to space, it is necessary to grasp both the subtle emotional ways in which the city is experienced by individuals as well as problematize the role of the built environment in the visualization of collective memory and emotions of particular groups. The focus on changing manifestations of the Habsburg nostalgia can bring then a better understanding of the range and scope of the city’s symbolic resources that might be mobilized for various purposes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-27
Author(s):  
Eka Permanasari ◽  
◽  
Thomas Lientino ◽  

Kalijodo has a long history in terms of gambling, prostitution, human trafficking and other illicit activities. Although it is a green belt area, the location had always being filled with semipermanent buildings. The area was changed its meaning in 2016 when the late Governor of Ahok with the help of the police and army, eradicated these housing and transformed this place as the community center (RPTRA-Ruang Publik Terpadu Ramah Anak). Together with Yori Antar, Basuki changed Kalijodo into a new center for Jakarta with its mural and skatepark. Former illicit users have been pushed out from the site. Some built a temporary shelter under the highway bridge while others went to their villages. After the fall of Basuki due to the blasphemy crime, the image of RPTRA Kalijodo was contested. Within a day, the area was filled with illegal parking and prostitution returned in different forms taking place under the highway bridge. Layers of meaning and use of Kalijodo transforms rapidly and in results changes the image of the city. Through observation, interviews and archival research, this paper analyses the contestation of the city image by investigating the relationship between the top-down approach and the everyday life uses of space.


Author(s):  
Anna S. Akimova ◽  

Moscow is the city which united the characters of A.N. Tolstoy’s novel “Peter the First”. Kitay-Gorod is the space where the action of the first book is mainly set. In the novel Tolstoy showed in great detail the everyday life of the city and its inhabi- tants. According to the I.E. Zabelin’s research (“History of the city of Moscow”) in late 17 — early 18 th centuries Moscow was like a big village that is why Tolstoy relied on his childhood memories about the life in the small village Sosnovka (Samara Region) describing the streets of Moscow. The novel begins with the description of a poor peasant household of Brovkin near Moscow, then Volkov’s noble estate is depicted and Menshikov’s house. The space of the city is expanding with each new “address”. Moscow estates, and in particular, connected with the figure of “guardian, lover of the Princess-ruler” V.V. Golitsyn, in Tolstoy’s novel are inextricably linked with the character’s living and with the life of the country. The description of the palace built by Golitsyn at the peak of his career is based on the Sergei Solovyov’s “History of Russia in ancient times”. Golitsyn left it and went to his estate outside Moscow Medvedkovo and from there in exile.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 11-41
Author(s):  
Daniela López ◽  
Valeria Laborda ◽  

The paper aims to analyse the potentiality of Schutzian phenomenological approach on institutions. We will maintain that this point of view has to take into account at least three aspects of institutions. Firstly, institutions should be considered as objective and sedimented configurations of meaning. Secondly, the historicity and the genesis of the institutional objectified meaning should be explored. Thirdly, life in modern societies shows how reference to the generating activities has been lost in our institutions and how that process has led to the disaffection of the citizens towards them. Motivated by understanding the process through which certain actors question their relative-natural concept of economic life and institute alternative types of economic actions, the article explores a case study of an economic institution in the City of Buenos Aires belonging to the so-called “Other” economy. Following the model of the well-informed citizen, the manuscript describes a type of “economic citizen” who transforms the imposed economic relevances experienced in everyday life into the centre of interest. The emergence of that interest is analysed by tracing back this particular economic institution to the process of sedimentation and of genesis of meaning. It is demonstrated that the process of institutionalization is shaped in contrast to dominant anonymous economic institutions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATALIA COSACOV ◽  
MARIANO D. PERELMAN

AbstractBased on extensive and long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2002 and 2009, and by analysing the presence, use and struggles over public space of cartoneros and vecinos in middle-class and central neighbourhoods of the city of Buenos Aires, this article examines practices, moralities and narratives operating in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Concentrating on spatialised interactions, it shows how class inequalities are reproduced and social distances are generated in the struggle over public space. For this, two social situations are addressed. First, we explore the way in which cartoneros build routes in middle-class neighbourhoods in order to carry out their task. Second, we present an analysis of the eviction process of a cartonero settlement in the city.


2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Simpson

This article examines the performative transformation of street spaces into performance places by considering the practices of street performers. Street performance here refers to a set of practices whereby either musical or nonmusical performances are undertaken in the street with the aim of eliciting donations from passersby. Drawing on ethnographic observations undertaken in Bath, U.K., and situating the discussion in recent conceptions of everyday life and public space, the specific sociospatial interventions that street performances make into Bath’s everyday life are considered. In doing so, the article focuses on the fleeting social relations that emerge from these interventions and what these can do to the experience of the everyday in terms of producing moments of sociality and conviviality. This is also reflected on in light of the various debates that have occurred in Bath as a result of these interventions relating to the increased regulation of street performances. The article then highlights the conflicted and contentious position that street performers occupy in the everyday life of such cities.


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