Wednesday 11 April 2012 at 12:00 - 13:30
CITIES, MOBILITY, PLACE AND SPACE Smith, R.J., Hall, T.
Keeping up Appearances: The Street-level Politics of Care and Repair
Nigel Thrift, among others, has drawn attention in recent writings to the significance of processes of urban maintenance and repair. He argues that such processes, often unacknowledged and unseen, yet at the same time ubiquitous in our everyday urban experience, accomplish 'the systematic replacement of place' and are essential as such to the continuing life of cities. To recognise this is to offer up a counter trope to that found among 'risk society' commentators and others, of the city as on the brink of catastrophe. Cities keep going, Thrift maintains, because they are forever patched up and kept running by 'infrastructures of kindness' neglected by many analysts.
In this paper we extend Thrift's arguments beyond an attention to the physical fabric of the city to take in to consideration the myriad minor, everyday and inconsequential ways – each one trifling, but of real significance in aggregate – in which the social fabric of the city is kept going, maintained and repaired. Having transferred attention from the physical to the social fabric, we go on to suggest that, welcome as any infrastructure of kindness might be, there is a politics to repair and upkeep. Thrift and others have recognised as much in discussion of inter alia the unequal distribution of repair and maintenance across urban neighbourhoods. We take this further, by looking at the ways in which upkeep itself, howsoever distributed, can become a political process, with winners and losers.
Sanders, E., Neville, L. Doing Outreach with Street-Based Sex Workers: Negotiating Risk in Urban Spaces
This paper draws on an ethnographic evaluation conducted with a third sector organization working with street- based sex workers. The researchers conducted mobile interviews with outreach workers, accompanying them on their outreach walks in London. The walks were tracked using a GPS device to help determine where key sites of engagement were occurring across different outreach teams. This paper will highlight the findings from these mobile interviews, looking at the ways in which outreach workers interact with urban spaces and places and examining the ways in which they cope with risk on a daily basis, exploring how they manage their physical and emotional safety.
Outreach workers’ main efforts were focused on women selling sex, but the nature of street-based sex work in this area meant that engaging with drug dealers and people with mental illness or substance abuse problems was also part of the outreach remit. Working with this client group presented a number of challenges, and often placed outreach workers in dangerous situations where their physical and emotional safety was at risk. Outreach workers negotiated liminal spaces in the city: deserted car parks, empty canal ways, refuse bin sheds, darkened alleys. Visiting these spaces and places, and engaging with a wide variety of vulnerable people required outreach workers to negotiate risk as part of their daily work practice. This paper will explore some of these physical and emotional risks and look at the coping mechanisms the outreach teams use as part of their working practice.
Binken, S., Blokland, T. Delft University of Technology, OTB Research Institute
Everyday Processes of Exclusion in Urban Public Space: An Interactional Approach Neil Smith's (1996) theory of 'urban revanchism' is one of the most pervasive perspectives in the recent literature to understand processes of exclusion in urban public space. In the light of this theoretical framework, exclusion takes place through neoliberal strategies aimed to attract capital, that is gentrifiers and tourists, while pushing marginal and minority groups out, as they would be detrimental to the quality of life in urban neighbourhoods and public spaces. Symbolic gentrification and purification of a city's public spaces represent such strategies. Whereas symbolic gentrification indirectly excludes people as they no longer recognize a place as theirs through changing commercial facilities (cf. Marcuse 1986; Zukin 2010), purification directly excludes people through regulatory means of control (cf. Duneier 1999; Mitchell 2003). This paper takes a different angle to the notion of exclusion in public space, as it moves from the state level and the large powers at work to the ground level of everyday interactions in the streets. Put differently, it seeks to explore exclusion in public space not in terms of entitlements of the marginalized (as in the Right to the City debate), but interactionally. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a socially and ethnically mixed inner-city neighbourhood in Utrecht, an 'ordinary city' (Robinson 2006) in the Netherlands, this paper scrutinizes everyday practices that are experienced as exclusionary, like standing on the middle of the pavement without stepping aside for a passer-by, or starting a conversation in a store in a language one cannot understand. Similarly, when in a local pub the eyes all turn to the door when a stranger enters is another example. All such practices are forms of boundary work (cf. Lamont 1992) where signs are explicitly picked up to mean that one is not welcomed and does not belong. Whether we need to address these all in terms of exclusion is a question of theoretical relevance that we would like to take up in this paper. In doing so, we aim to critically engage with existing theories on exclusion and urban public space.
89 Middlesex University
ROGER STEVENS 07 Cardiff University
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