1,720,959 research outputs found
Fugitive Place-Making in Black London: Urban Struggles, Care, and Refusal
Full text linkTransnational protest movements continue to expose the enduring legacies of colonial exploitation and institutionalised racism within and beyond European cities. They foreground the systemic conditions under which Black lives are rendered disproportionately vulnerable to premature death. In doing so, they expose the enduring entanglements of racial capitalism, state violence and spatial exclusion. Through their ongoing political agitation these movements highlight the need for spatio-temporally situated and relationally embedded engagements with Black urban lives. My thesis responds to that call by examining place-making practices of enclosure and refusal throughout Black London’s post-World War II development.
Grounded in the ethnographic narrative of “being halfway while shooting”, I explore how Black lives are enclosed by institutional racism, how this enclosure is spatialised and how Black and differently racialised Londoners refuse these spatial enclosures through everyday and collective place-making practices. At the intersection of structural constraint and the desire to enact Black freedom in London, I specifically foreground the emergence of fugitive place-making practices.
Conceptually, I bring (critical) urban geography scholarship, Black studies and Black (British)Geographies scholarship into conversation. I develop “being halfway while shooting” as a relational concept that foregrounds the production of racialised urban knowledges, the multiplicity of Black enclosures, and the plurality of place-based strategies committed to refusal. I do so by stressing the relevance of Black fugitive thinking to account for the ongoing refusals that mark the relationship between Blackness and the British city. Methodologically, I adopt a research-activist ethnographic approach, grounded in my long-term engagement with a housing campaign in East London that organises around the housing needs of London’s racialised and gendered urban poor. Using qualitative methods - archival research, interviews, (non-)participant observations, document and media analysis - I embed contemporary struggles into long and ongoing histories of racial-capitalist urban development as well as Black and multi-ethnic refusal.
The empirical chapters trace place-making practices of enclosure and refusal across London’s post-World War II urban development. By examining the aftermath of urban revolts and changing urban welfare regimes, I explore how racialised urban governance has been historically materialised in and through the city. At the same time, I foreground how within this racialised construction of the British city, Black and differently racialised Londoners continue to hold open the possibility of refusal through places in which communal care and self-determination can be enacted. I then turn to the struggle over housing in East London, showing how contemporary processes of racialised dehumanisation and ongoing displacement are both historically rooted and actively contested. In the final empirical chapter I accentuate the relevance of these findings for German-speaking critical urban geography debates.
The research shows that racial capitalist urbanism reproduces enclosures through practices of value extraction, spatial displacement, and the policing of Black subjectivities. In response, Black and differently racialised Londoners engage in fugitive place-making. Rooted in communal care, political organisation, collective education and cultural affirmation, these practices reassert Black presence and belonging. They offer an enduring mode of place-based refusal and the ongoing possibility to stay in the city differently. These findings not only demonstrate the academic significance of my research but also underscore the urgent need to support the place-making practices of Black and differently racialised urban communities, who continue to refuse the racialised enclosure of the British city from within.
From these empirical insights, I propose the concept of a fugitive sense of place - a theoretical lens that accounts for the racialised reproduction of urban space and the transformative place-making practices of those who refuse its logics. Rather than offering prescriptive policy recommendations, I call for a reorientation of urban geographical enquiry by centring Black spatial practices, knowledges and imaginations. Through the lens of “being halfway while shooting”, I argue for a rethinking of human habitation and urban theory through the lived experiences of Black survival and refusal. Attending to a fugitive sense of place, I propose new avenues for human geography research to explore how fugitive place-making practices reshape the meanings, conditions, and possibilities of urban life
When Ecotopia grows : Politicizing the stories of Swedish sustainable urban development
No full textSweden is known world-wide for its achievements in the field of sustainable urban development. Due to this global recognition Swedish stories and policies of sustainable urban development are being spread across various spatial and institutional contexts. Focusing on SymbioCity and its approach as examples for such stories, this thesis seeks to elaborate on the de-politicization of urban environments through sustainable urban development policies. In doing so, this thesis synthesises urban political ecology and policy mobility literature to form a theoretical framework to investigate the mobilization and legitimization of such environments. Drawing on findings provided by methods of text analysis and interviews, it is illustrated that Swedish stories of sustainable urban development construct a de-politicized spatiality supported by capital, desires of influence and “the planner”. The thesis concludes by arguing that planning research needs to critically address the process of de-politicization and support the articulation of a political Ecotopia.
Who can afford to be human? Struggling for Affordable Housing in East London
No full textIn this article I expand contemporary political‐economic analyses of housing affordability. Specifically, I engage with urban geography research around biopolitical logics within processes of housing financialization and contribute to debates of ‘making live’ and ‘letting die’ by mobilizing Sylvia Wynter's anticolonial scholarship to emphasize alternative narrations of human life emerging alongside (bio)political‐economic rationales that enable the modern human, Man. In this study, which centres on three years of ethnographic research with the Focus E15 housing campaign in the East London borough of Newham, I stress the human as field of political struggle within debates around housing affordability. Situating my research in the struggle of Focus E15 campaigners against the inhuman conditions of Newham's temporary accommodation residents, I reveal how debates around housing affordability within Newham's urban development become constituted through narratives of mixed/balanced communities, the shifting of responsibilities and coproduction efforts. I argue that these debates rely on Man's narrative of homo oeconomicus, which legitimizes the expulsion of temporary accommodation residents from Newham. In contrast, I highlight how the Focus E15 Campaign imagines affordability beyond political‐economic rationales, thus spatializing an alternative way of being human, homo narrans. Consequently, I foreground the human as contested grammar within urban geography research on housing affordability to move beyond Man's geographies of managed life and death
The Fugitive Underground of British Blackness : Insights from London’s ‘Riotous’ Geographies
No full textThis paper historicizes the riotous geographies of British Blackness by focusing on three so-called “riots” in London’s post-World War II development, the 1958 Notting Hill uprisings, the 1981 Brixton uprisings and the 2011 pan-London uprisings. Mobilizing debates in Black (British) Geographies, I challenge state narrations of these events as illegitimate expressions of Black Britons’ political discontent. Based on archival research, I expose such framings as ongoing attempts of whiteness to render Black British geographies “ungeographic” within a supposed white British geography. Employing fugitivity as method, I show how these riotous events constituted possibilities for escaping racialized spatio-political categories of British state geographies. I consider British Blackness as political category and as a historically contingent discursive construction that mobilizes people from the African diaspora in specific ways but also stretches beyond them. Thus, I ask: How does Blackness continue to escape attempts of capturing it in and through British state geographies and in what ways does this escape constitute a transfiguration of Black British (un)geographies? The three historical cases I examine exemplify the struggles between the state’s efforts to enclose and exclude Black Britons and their efforts to forge an underground of British Blackness in the wake of Empire
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Mobilising post-political environments : tracing the selective geographies of Swedish sustainable urban development
No full textThis paper develops an analytical framework from which to understand the mobilisation of post-political urban environments across spatial and institutional contexts. Our analysis of two closely related cases from a Swedish context reveals the potential benefits of combining studies on urban political ecology and policy mobility. By utilising Actor-Network Theory (ANT) we illustrate how post-political environments that are shaped by mobile and mutating policies of sustainable urban development are stabilised through distinct discursive strategies, capital investments and the desire for increased influence within global frames of action and contribute to the creation of, what we call, selective geographies
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
(In)Human Urbanity: Black Geographies of the planetary
No full textAktuelle Debatten um planetare Transformationsprozesse unterscheiden regelmäßig zwischen nicht-menschlichen und menschlichen Akteur_innen, ohne die Kategorie des Menschen in ihrer räumlich-diskursiven Konstruktion und Reproduktion zu hinterfragen. Wir argumentieren, dass Menschsein keine selbstverständliche Kategorie ist, sondern eine umkämpfte räumlich-diskursive Praxis. Inspiriert von den Black Geographies und dem antikolonialen Denken Sylvia Wynters leisten wir einen Beitrag zum Verständnis (un)menschlicher Urbanität, der die historisch wechselseitige Konstitution der europäischen Stadt sowie planetarer Diskurse des Menschseins ins Zentrum rückt. Dazu skizzieren wir die Geographien Schwarzer Menschen im deutschsprachigen Raum in ihren planetaren Zusammenhängen zwischen räumlich-diskursiven Konstruktionen des (Un)Menschlichen und Reproduktionen der rassifizierten Stadt. Inmitten dieser (un)menschlichen Urbanität verweisen wir gleichzeitig auf alternative Narrative und Praktiken des Menschseins. Da unsere Ergebnisse die anhaltende Marginalisierung Schwarzer Lebenswelten und Erfahrungen in der deutschsprachigen Stadtforschung belegen, verweisen wir auf die Notwendigkeit einer Intervention durch Schwarze Geographien.Current debates on planetary transformation processes regularly distinguish between non-human and human actors, without questioning the category of the human in its spatial-discursive construction and reproduction. We argue that being human is not a self-evident category, but a contested spatial-discursive practice. Inspired by Black Geographies and the anti-colonial thinking of Sylvia Wynter, we contribute to the understanding of (in)human urbanity that focuses on the historically reciprocal constitution of the European city and planetary discourses of humanness. To this end, we outline the geographies of Black people in German-speaking countries in their planetary contexts between spatial-discursive constructions of the (in)human and reproductions of the racialized city. In the midst of this (in)human urbanity, we simultaneously point to alternative narratives and practices of being human. As our findings demonstrate the persistent marginalization of Black lifeworlds and experiences in German-speaking urban research, we point to the need for intervention by Black geographies
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