Chinatown Invisible: Hybrid-mapping and making-do

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-181
Author(s):  
Liska Chan
Keyword(s):  
Urban Setting ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Critical Geography ◽  
Hybrid Mapping ◽  
Critical Cartography ◽  
Urban Structures ◽  
Visual Mapping ◽  
Creative Research ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

Abstract This article is a proposal to address visual mapping as a means to reveal the interrelationships between a place represented, a place lived and a place perceived. A form of critical cartography called hybrid-mapping is used to interrogate the combined sociocultural and biophysical legacies of the continually changing landscape. This approach expressly facilitates a focused interpretation of the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the nuanced connections between landscape, history and culture. Offering to a larger conversation about landscape representation, this article introduces, situates and analyses the application of hybrid-mapping in a creative research project entitled Chinatown Invisible about Manhattan's Chinatown. The Chinatown Invisible project uses hybrid-mapping to interrogate the quotidian practice of 'making-do' to adapt existing urban structures to fulfil everyday needs. Capturing and understanding making-do is vital because it sheds light on the ways in which residents informally claim space and how they shape the ongoing physical evolution of their neighbourhood, establishing their 'right to the city'. Chinatown Invisible shows how hybrid-mapping unveils the dynamics between culture and landscape in an urban setting, bridging critical geography and landscape representation to examine multiple ways in which we can interact with the processes of real, imagined and perceived space.

scholarly journals Refugees Hosting Other Refugees: Endurance and Maintenance of Care in Ouzaii (Lebanon)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Batoul Yassine ◽  
Howayda Al-Harithy ◽  
Camillo Boano
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Spatial Mechanisms ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

Abstract This article examines the socio-spatial mechanisms that emerge when refugees host other refugees. It argues that there is an underlying social infrastructure of care that impacts the refugees’ choice of destinations and modes of survival. When refugees host other refugees from close networks of relatives and neighbours, they create their own spatial clusters. In the process, the social infrastructure of care offers one mode of security to vulnerable refugees. Care as a concept and an approach is related to ideas of endurance and maintenance. It facilitates multiple dimensions, from space, to affection and to the everyday. It is able to reconfigure a life possible, life-enduring and a life meaningful in an urban setting. We focus on Ouzaii in Beirut, Lebanon. Ouzaii has been a destination for multiple displaced groups over different periods of time. Ouzaii currently hosts an approximate 10,000 Syrian refugees. They chose Ouzaii as their destination after they were helped by existing refugees who offered shelter and access to jobs. The resultant socio-spatial practices, flourishing businesses and leisurely facilities are evidence of successful social networks that form an infrastructure of care. They also play a role in the reconstitution of Ouzaii itself. We conclude with reflections on how urban informality may offer refugees an alternative right to the city while allowing them to escape the gaze of the humanitarian-aid apparatus that can signify their vulnerability by reducing them to only being aid recipients. Instead, they form protective socio-spatial networks that have proved to be powerful in sustaining their livelihoods, guarding them from possible social discrimination or political threats.

Right(s) from the ground up: internal displacement, the urban periphery and belonging to the city

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Berents
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Internal Displacement ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Internally Displaced ◽  
Protracted Conflict ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Urban Periphery ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

Often overlooked, internal displacement affects millions around the globe. Colombia’s protracted conflict, which has internally displaced approximately six million people (IDMC 2015a, 2015b), has embedded social exclusion and violence as features of everyday life for many Colombians who find themselves living in informal settlements on the urban periphery. Increasingly, connections between urban exclusion, insecurity and poverty can be read as a ‘violent’ failure of citizenship (Koonings and Kruijt 2007, 12) that negates the lived experience of those on the margins. This chapter contends that despite this negation those who struggle to survive make claims of the right to belong to (and in) the city through placing their bodies in public spaces as well as finding new articulations of place and belonging amongst the complexities of the everyday. Through exploring these acts this chapter asks how the internally displaced challenge established notions of the right to the city and are prompting alternative articulations of belonging.

Urban Sites of the Everyday and the International

2021 ◽  
pp. 292-306
Author(s):  
Matt Davies
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
The Other ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Research Paradigm ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Performance As Research ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Sites

The Other City is a downloadable audio play performed by the listener in an urban setting. Its performance opens an opportunity to explore perceptions of the city through comparisons with urban experiences in Rio de Janeiro. The cities are thus encountered as aesthetic subjects, or subjects who “articulate and mobilize thinking.” This chapter begins with an overview of the field of aesthetic research into cities and how methods that have emerged in the performance-as-research paradigm have helped illuminate urbanism and critique received wisdom about contemporary urbanization. It goes on to explain The Other City and how the play mobilizes and challenges notions of performance as research. By examining how the performance of the everyday became a political gesture in Rio in preparation for the Olympics, it shows how politics can be inaugurated in the everyday. It concludes more cautiously, however, insisting that performance cannot provide political guarantees.

scholarly journals Racism in multicultural neighbourhoods in Chile: Housing precarity and coexistence in a migratory context

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-181
Author(s):  
Macarena Bonhomme
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Everyday Interaction ◽  
The City ◽  
Depth Interviews

Chile is one of the countries with major destination flows from Latin America. In such a context, new distinctions and racial formations have emerged, establishing different forms of social exclusion and racism that are performed in the everyday interaction and socio-cultural practices that take place in residential neighbourhoods. This research is based on one of the most multicultural boroughs in Santiago, Recoleta, historically located in a territory called ‘La Chimba.’ The aim is to examine the intercultural coexistence in increasingly multicultural neighbourhoods in the context of South-South migration, in order to discuss the emerging social conflict, understanding how housing policies and limited access to decent housing by migrants reproduce everyday racism. Drawing on a larger research project that consisted in a 17-month ethnography, 70 in-depth interviews and two focus groups with migrants and Chileans between 2015 and 2018, this article shows and discusses how public spaces are racialised through social practices and interactions, and how the making of ‘race’ in urban spaces have an impact on the way in which migrants inhabit and navigate urban spaces and negotiate their ‘right to the city’ in the everyday.

scholarly journals A Smart Right to the City—Grounding Corporate Storytelling and Questioning Smart Urbanism

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (17) ◽  
pp. 9590
Author(s):  
Anke Strüver ◽  
Rivka Saltiel ◽  
Nicolas Schlitz ◽  
Bernhard Hohmann ◽  
Thomas Höflehner ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Smart City ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
European Cities ◽  
Entrepreneurial City ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Urban Problems ◽  
The City ◽  
Rights To The City ◽  
Smart Urbanism

Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injustice, inequality and exclusion, we argue for a smart right to the city. There is an urgent need for a thorough account of the entrepreneurial mode of technocapitalist smart urbanism. While much of both affirmative and critical research on Smart City developments equate or even reduce smartness to digital infrastructures, we put actual smartness—in the sense of social justice and sustainability—at centre stage. This paper builds on a fundamental structural critique of (1) the entrepreneurial city (Harvey) and (2) the capitalist city (Lefebvre). Drawing upon Lefebvre’s right to the city as a normative framework, we use Smart City developments in the city of Graz as an illustration of our argument. Considering strategies of waste and mobility management, we reflect on how they operate as spatial and technical fixes—fixing the limits of capitalism’s growth. By serving specific corporate interests, these technocapitalist strategies yet fail to address the underlying structural causes of pressing urban problems and increasing inequalities. With Lefebvre’s ongoing relevant argument for the importance of use value of urban infrastructures as well as his claim that appropriation and participation are essential, we discuss common rights to the city: His framework allows us to envision sustainable and just—actually smart—alternatives: alternatives to technocapitalist entrepreneurial urbanisation. In this respect, a smart right to the city is oriented towards the everyday needs of all inhabitants.

Forced migration, citizenship, and space: the case of Syrian Kurdish refugees in İstanbul

2016 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 77-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gülay Kılıçaslan
Keyword(s):  
Participant Observation ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Syrian Refugees ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

AbstractThe influx of hundreds of thousands of people from Syria to Turkey, especially into major cities such as İstanbul, together with the Turkish government’s policies towards Syrian refugees, has led to various changes in urban spaces. This article has a twofold objective: it examines and discusses the everyday lives of these refugees with regards to the processes and mechanisms of their exclusion and inclusion in İstanbul, while employing a multiscalar analysis of migration in terms of combining nation-state policies of migration, citizenship, space, and the concept of the “right to the city.” Relying upon interviews and participant observation in the Kanarya and Bayramtepe neighborhoods of İstanbul between 2011 and 2015, I outline the ways in which Syrian Kurdish refugees have been actively transforming İstanbul’s peripheries through their interactions with the Kurds who were forcibly displaced from their rural homes in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s.

A Right to the City?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Halper
Keyword(s):  
Right To The City ◽  
The City

San Francisco's Vision for the Future: An Integrated Urban Wastewater Management Plan

2009 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan W. Loiacono ◽  
Chu-Fei H. Ho ◽  
Natalie V. Sierra ◽  
Domènec Jolis ◽  
Carolyn Chiu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Rainwater Harvesting ◽  
Control Plant ◽  
Management Plan ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Wastewater Management ◽  
Urban Watershed ◽  
Aging Infrastructure ◽  
The City

The City and County of San Francisco (“City”) embarked upon a 30-year master planning process in part prompted by public concerns related to the neighbourhood impacts of the Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant (SEP). The Sewer System Master Plan, as it is called, developed a long term Integrated Urban Watershed Management Plan for the City's treatment plants and collection system. This paper focuses on the planning framework and public input to the process, particularly as it relates to proposed changes to the SEP. The resulting improvements address issues of replacing aging infrastructure, eliminating odor emissions, and visually screening the treatment plants that are situated within an urban setting. The recommended project addresses the needed repair of the existing infrastructure; and proposes that the City move towards an integrated urban watershed approach, initially through localized rainwater harvesting and opportunistic water reclamation.

A utopia do direito à cidade: Possibilidades de superação da dicotomia favela-bairro no Rio de Janeiro

GEOgraphia ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (14) ◽  
Author(s):  
Márcio Piñon de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

A utopia do direito à cidade,  no  caso específico do Rio de Janeiro, começa, obrigatoriamente, pela  superação da visão dicotômica favela-cidade. Para isso, é preciso que os moradores da favela possam sentir-se tão cidadãos quanto os que têm moradias fora das favelas. A utopia do direito à cidade tem de levar a favela a própria utopia da cidade. Uma cidade que não se fragmente em oposições asfalto-favela, norte-sul, praia-subúrbio e onde todos tenham direito ao(s) seu(s) centro(s). Oposições que expressam muito mais do que diferenças de  localização e que  se apresentam recheadas de  segregação, estereótipos e  ideologias. Por outro  lado, o direito a cidade, como possibilidade histórica, não pode ser pensado exclusivamente a partir da  favela. Mas as populações  que aí habitam guardam uma contribuição inestimável para  a  construção prática  desse direito. Isso porque,  das  experiências vividas, emergem aprendizados e frutificam esperanças e soluções. Para que a favela seja pólo de um desejo que impulsione a busca do direito a cidade, é necessário que ela  se  pense como  parte da história da própria cidade  e sua transformação  em metrópole.Abstract The right  to the city's  utopy  specifically  in Rio de Janeiro, begins by surpassing  the dichotomy approach between favela and the city. For this purpose, it is necessary, for the favela dwellers, the feeling of citizens as well as those with home outside the favelas. The right to the city's utopy must bring to the favela  the utopy to the city in itself- a non-fragmented city in terms of oppositions like "asphalt"-favela, north-south, beach-suburb and where everybody has right to their center(s). These oppositions express much more the differences of location and present  themselves full of segregation, stereotypes and ideologies. On  the other  hand, the right to  the city, as historical possibility, can not be thought  just from the favela. People that live there have a contribution for a practical construction of this right. 

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