Involuntary Displacement and Rehabilitation: A Comparative Study of Hirakud and Kaptai Dams of India and Bangladesh

The present article has made a comparative study of Hirakud and Kaptai dams of India and Bangladesh, respectively, to study the approach of governance of both countries in addressing the issue of displacement, resettlement and rehabilitation. It found that the civil–military regime of Bangladesh and the democratic regime of India are equally repressive in addressing the aforesaid issues. However, in the case of the Kaptai Dam, the whole episode of displacement led to arms conflicts, statelessness and insurgency in the state, while no such things were experienced in the case of the Hirakud Dam.

Aesthetics of Gentrification

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary-gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

Fractured and Effaced Façades

The rise of Fascism in Europe and its aftermath rest ever in the background of Chapter Six and its collection of ‘Disfigured Bodies’. The face and gaze of Antonin Artaud best characterises the tone of this series of violent destructions, lost ones and the isolated (like Picasso in occupied Paris). Amid ‘Veiled and Displaced Faces’ and ‘Empty Gazes’, involuntary displacement and sensory deprivation haunt representations of the human form. The head and human figures presented here are almost unrecognisable when re-conceived by a metteur en scène like Étienne Decroux or a sculptor like Alberto Giacometti. Marc Chagall, in exile, invents fantasy forms that masquerade the figures of opera and ballet performers with colourful, cushioned exteriors in magical scenographic spaces. Experimentation with actor as object manipulator or manipulacteur, like the scenographic, dynamic form in some of Jacques Lecoq’s work, displace dynamic expression to ‘things’ outside of the body form itself. In Chapter Six, some non-verbal performers search for statements beyond language: texts in the materiality of space itself. The abstracted silhouette speaks as depersonalised, masquerading image.

Diaspora

Diaspora as a concept and a particular phenomenon of migration has a double origin: etymologically, it comes from the Greek verb diaspeirein, meaning to scatter; historically, it refers to the dispersal of the Jews from their ancestral land after the destruction of the Second Temple in 586 bce. The term has been applied to the involuntary displacement of other peoples—for example, the African, Armenian, and Irish diasporas—but the Jewish diaspora has served as the principal paradigm of diasporic experience. Based on the Jewish “prototypical” case, the concept has been commonly defined as encompassing a collective identity shaped by the trauma that accompanies a group’s forced departure from its ancestral land and its emotional and material attachment to the origins that is sustained by the desire to return home or by symbolic manifestations of nostalgia. Although scholars have identified different kinds of diasporas—labor, trading, imperial diasporas—the term has maintained its emphasis on dislocation and loss, evoking at once the experience and politics of dispossession and ethnic identification. Since the second half of the 20th century, however, this understanding of diaspora has expanded to embrace a range of displaced communities—immigrants, migrants, exiles, refugees—and has thus come to be identified with global mobilities as an aftereffect of modernity. The malleability of the concept has given rise to many debates about its meaning, application, and methodology, especially since the late 1980s when diaspora began to attract systematic critical attention. The study of diaspora is generally characterized by both a centripetal and a centrifugal approach: the former, holding up the home nation as the ultimate reference point and thus viewing diasporas as distinct and cohesive entities, is concerned with demarcating the boundaries of the term by establishing categorical definitions and typologies; the latter, viewing diaspora as inhabiting an interstitial space in relation to the receiving nation and thus as a hybrid formation and social condition, is interested in diasporic subjectivity as a question of becoming. This opening up of the concept of diaspora, along with the increased global flow of people and parallel developments in other fields, has meant that, since the latter part of the 20th century, diaspora is examined in the adjacent contexts of globalization, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, transnationalism, and hybridity.

From displacement to resettlement: how current policies shape eviction narratives among urban poor in the Philippines

Purpose This study aims to examine the experiences of urban poor relocatees in their resettlement communities, specifically those who were relocated from the Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, Valenzuela and Quezon City areas to the province of Bulacan, Philippines. This study hopes to convey the importance of revisiting the law on socialized housing in the Philippines. Design/methodology/approach This study gathered qualitative data through 2 focus group discussions among 28 participants who came from 3 resettlement sites in San Jose del Monte City, Bulacan Province, Philippines. The resettlement areas are owned and managed by the National Housing Authority of the Philippine Government. Findings Results show that resettlement experiences are stories of survival under impoverished conditions. Lack of housing facilities or poorly built units characterize their relocation experience aside from having no immediate access to basic utilities such as electricity and water, despite a law that supposedly secures these rights to relocatees. The expensive cost of transportation and the lack of livelihood also heavily strain the lives of the relocated population. Originality/value This study illustrates that involuntary displacement predicts poor living conditions upon resettlement. This study is an inquiry not only of existing conditions of socialized housing in resettlement areas but also past realities of these housing communities at the onset of the displacees’ relocation.

Climate Change, Vulnerability, Social Conflicts and Human Displacement in the Andes: The case of Huaytapallana Glacier

The objective of this review was to identify the links between Climate Change, Vulnerability, Social Conflicts and Human Displacement in the Andes. The different factors that influence the vulnerability of people and communities are analyzed, such as the diversity of the impacts of climate change, the retreat of glaciers, the loss of biological diversity, health, agricultural production and scenarios with the presence of water scarcity. Adaptive behaviors are observed in the inhabitants of Andean communities, but they are not sufficient, because in many occasions people are forced to migrate to other cities. Five ways of responding to climate risks or hazards are suggested: 1) reduction and control of global warming, 2) adaptation to conditions resulting from climate change, 3) resistance, 4) mitigation, and 5) involuntary displacement. Finally, it concludes by stating that there is an intricate link between global warming, climate change, vulnerability and social conflicts, and that migration is a product of climate change.