Alternative urban imaginaries 2: Storying radically interdependent counter-cities

Presenting author: Claske Dijkema (swisspeace, University of Basel)

Other authors: Ayla Korajac (University of Grenoble Alpes)

This paper seeks to go beyond the elite narrative of ethno-national identities and the marking of territory accordingly in post-war Bosnia. The situation in Brcko, the area of our field research, in East Bosnia-Herzegovina, is typical for post-war Bosnian cities. The liberal peacebuilding project resulted in reinforcing ethno-nationalist segregation. Although divides were created by the war, they were maintained by international peacebuilding strategies such as the power sharing system (Björkdahl and Gusic 2013). Exemplified in the city center of Brcko, war monuments for each of the three ethnic groups mark central space in an exclusive fashion through the use of mutually exclusive symbols.

While presented as popular will, ethno-nationalist narratives of space are elitist, masculinist and militaristic and do not speak for all people. In particular younger people, born after the war, seek for everyday (spatial) experiences beyond the war. In our search for spaces that escape the ethno-nationalist logic and that can tell a counter-narrative of post-war cities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, we have come across Ficibajr: a nature/leisure area that is not claimed by any ethno-nationalist group. It seems to be a common ground, where being together across differences is unproblematic, based on a shared appreciation of the area. We understand Ficibajr as a peacescape with a socio-petal function that can serve as counternarrative to the ethno-nationalist claiming of space.

Presenting author: Salene Schloffel-Armstrong (University of Auckland)

Within contemporary cities - dominated by processes of continuing privatisation and growing inequity - public libraries offer some different ways of conceptualising urban life. Often described as the last holdout of public space in the city, the library's focus on inclusive access to space, knowledge and shared resources creates a small symbolic rupture within capitalist logics of city making. Although there are definitive limitations to their emancipatory role as institutions, this paper explores the potential of libraries to be used as urban commons and as key forms of social infrastructure. Due in large part to processes of urban restructuring, and the widespread defunding of public and social services, an increased diversity of locations have taken on the responsibilities and practices of care across cities (Power & Bartlett, 2018). In response to this deficit of care, formal and informal networks of support have emerged - although in fragmented ways - organised within and around central public libraries.

This paper will explore the geographies of care that exist in connection to inner city public libraries in New Zealand, bringing to light already existing, alternative practices of urban inhabitance, that can assist us in imagining cities differently.

Presenting author: Rachael Walshe (James Cook University)

Other author: Lisa Law (James Cook University)

The urban population boom in the Anthropocene brings with it new challenges. Some of these challenges are rooted in the removal of the natural realm and cause a phenomenon referred to as Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA). It is proposed in this paper that EGA is a contributor to urban food vulnerability. The severity of this problem will increase as we propel further into urban life, consequently pulling us further away from food system awareness and practices. Bringing nature back into the fold is a proven way of addressing this problem and community gardens as green spaces are effective ways of introducing food system knowledge and overall well-being to individuals. When used as an immersive education tool they can act as dynamic and hybrid spaces that increase engagement with curricula, create a sense of belonging and build place-based relationships with the environment through food growing practices.

This paper reviews some key literature and proposes a conceptual framework for re-imagining school gardens as 'third places' that help transform the 'second place' of the school. The education system in Australia follows subject-centred pedagogies, yet environmental educators have highlighted that experience-centred approaches are the most effective for active engagement. By applying a more-than-human-lens a nexus of benefits that increases the effectiveness of experience-centred approaches is brought forward. In the combination of these theories, an answer to the encroaching issue of EGA can be found and future urban food systems paradigms reimagined.

Presenting author: Christina Ergler (University of Otago)

Other authors: Claire Freeman (University of Otago)

Although children of all ages have the right to a voice their participation in urban environments, and particular in creating child-friendly cities, pre-literate children's voices are absent in these debates. In this paper, we explore pre-schoolers' experiences in and expectations for their urban environments by drawing on a participatory research project that used photovoice and a tile-based mapping exercise.

Findings suggest that young children, although widely absent in the urban, policy or child-friendly city discourses, deeply engage with and value their city and its human and non-human inhabitants. In the study pre-schoolers from New Zealand created an urban environment which cares for their citizens by being safe, socially and physically connected and has destinations, amenities and services available for all ages and abilities. We argue in this paper that pre-schoolers created not only child-friendly cities, but carefull cities that ensure the liveability and wellbeing for humans of all ages and non-humans.

Presenting author: Inka Santala (University of Wollongong)

COVID-19 demonstrated the necessity of sharing in cities: not only between citizens but across civic, market and government domains. Critical analysis of urban sharing tends to draw attention to commercially-oriented platforms as market-encased means to enable capitalist consumption, sustaining inequitable power relations across these domains. However, recent theorisations have begun to focus on more community-based sharing initiatives as civic-led forms of social innovation, transforming dominant neoliberalist urban norms, behaviours, and structures.

Combining transformative social innovation thinking with the epistemological techniques of postcapitalist politics, this paper applies the approach of reading for difference to this "Sharing City". In doing so, it seeks to shape not only a counter-narrative to urban neoliberalism but also a more reparative language for urban governance that recognises inherent interdependency across social and sectoral domains. Drawing from research completed in the City of Sydney and Inner West, the analysis explores the agency produced through sharing as neither market-encased nor civic-led but both. This interdependency and related agency present different ways of being, doing and thinking the city as shared. Hence, shedding light on the potential of communal sharing initiatives to prefigure just and sustainable urban futures, the paper calls for a revaluing of urban interdependency.

Presenting author: Jamie Wang (University of Sydney)

A poetry reading: Act now, act how, hope  not, real hope?

How might we develop ways of re-thinking, re-seeing and re-storying cities,
how might we reimagine a more inclusive urban environment with diverse human and more-than-human elements, co-shaping cities and their social-cultural and economic relations,
how might urban reimagining cultivate genuine conditions for a more co-habited city,
how might engaging with the more-than-human worlds in reimagining urban sustainability expand the scope of urban planning,
how might we shift the sustainable urban narrative from urban planning to urban performativity,
how might contemporary urban approaches be reconfigured and redesigned to destabilise and intervene into high-tech, capitalist modes of urban development,
how are new agents/vectors attached to the narrative of urbanism and open up possible futures?

This poetry reading is a performative response to some of these questions. It is admittedly speculative, but full of real hope for possible changes. 

Imagine a city of
one rhythm one life one movement one text one kind of being and now reimagine
a city of many worlds.

Presenting author: Ashraful Alam (University of Otago)

Other author: Momtaj Bintay Khalil (University of Technology Sydney), Michele Lobo (Deakin University)

Techno-politics and materiality of public infrastructures have been the focus of a large body of urban cultural research. In this paper, however, we are inspired by the resurgent interest in urban planning and theory that reimagine infrastructures as lively socio-technical systems that in most of the time, are informal, interstitial and initiated from the below. We build on these theoretical and empirical insights to conceptualise the notion of 'shadow infrastructures' in two informal settlements that evolve in between, under and over deliberately designed urban infrastructures.

We see these infrastructures as outcomes of more-than-social practices that emerge at the volatile intersections of vectors of power and inequality, often associated with frugal innovation within neoliberal discourses. However, these are also embodied ethics of becoming in unequal cities stratified by gender, caste, class, and religion. This paper uses affective ethnographies (participant observation and auto-photography, walking interview and focus groups) to draw attention to the distributed agencies of humans and beyond, whom we consider as 'shadow citizens' in making these infrastructural lives possible.

Presenting author: Ferne Edwards (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskaplige universitet)

Other authors: Ida Nilstad Pettersen (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskaplige universitet)

Recognising the need to re-conceptualize the city as a multi-species space, this presentation analyses outcomes from the subject 'Experts in Teamwork - Designing In Urban Natures' (NTNU, 2021). Led by scholars in cultural anthropology and design for sustainability, this subject united students from different disciplines "to recognise, frame, encounter, restore, protect and co-exist with more-than-human species" (https://www.ntnu.no/eit/tpd4852). Students were encouraged to step outside disciplinary boundaries to think beyond static, cookie-cutter NBS approaches to produce innovative speculative visions of human/nature entanglements within the context of Trondheim, Norway.

The subject witnessed shifting understandings of 'urban natures' from specific species - from bees, water and bats - to human/nonhuman assemblages, while 'the city' became a place of human/nonhuman relationality and flows. More-than-human relationships extend from a tolerance and appreciation for nature, towards an ethics of care, a right to the city, and an acceptance for letting nature go 'wild'. So too do these visions occur from short (to devise technological solutions and establish new human relationships), to mid (engineering solutions) and long term approaches (developing new urban ecosystems and catalysing human behavioural change), contributing to literature on socially and environmentally just and sustainable transitions.

Presenting author: Sarah Gelbard (McGill University, Canada)

The future-oriented utopian cities of urban planning imaginaries sit in stark contrast to actually existing cities. Behind policies for beautification and rejuvenation is the socio-political ugliness of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and racism. Resisting formal research standards that reproduce these oppressive structures, I respond with a critical autoethnography of the Ottawa punk scene. [...] wish i could fly away and burn it all down we can start again [...]

In some of the most depressed and ugly parts of the city, are spaces of resistance based in camaraderie, mutual-aid, care, and joy. This counter-narrative interrupts the normative city narrative. Past-forward city imaginaries are oriented by nostalgia, lament, and hope. In part, I tell these counter-narratives through the counter-form of songwriting as research text. [...] feels like time to change my solipsistic life and my errant ways [...]

The out-of-context out-of-place lyrics are filled with unfinished thoughts, partial expressions, multiple meanings, intersecting stories, inconclusive endings, selective legibility, and depths of superficiality. Consciously and subconsciously I write them to contain and express academic value, punk value, and (inter)personal value, the meaning-making is left to the reader and accepts that there are multiple points of access and denied access. [...] wasn't built to stay. forever unsettled. [...]