Evento

El denominado Estallido Social del 18/19 de octubre del año 2019 en Chile puso las miradas del mundo sobre nuestro país por las jornadas de protestas, las cuales cuestionaban el modelo económico desigual desarrollado durante los últimos 30 años en el país. Las protestas se iniciaron con la evasión en estaciones del metro por estudiantes secundarios, producto del alza del valor del pasaje en la ciudad de Santiago. Estas movilizaciones estudiantiles se propagan por diferentes lugares, extendiéndose a diferentes sectores de la población y proliferando diferentes críticas al modelo económico y político neoliberal, ampliándose las demandas. Las movilizaciones fueron acompañadas con espacios de discusión en los barrios que se materializó en cabildos, asambleas o trawünes, los cuales problematizaron y pusieron en discusión las principales inquietudes que se expresaban en las marchas y manifestaciones diarias. La represión y violencia policial y militar, producto del estado de emergencia declarado por el presidente Sebastián Piñera, fueron un punto de inflexión que trajo a la memoria la dictadura cívico-militar llevada por Pinochet entre los años 1973 y 1989, poniendo al centro de los problemas la Constitución de 1980. Luego de casi cuatro semanas de movilización, el 15 de noviembre los partidos políticos firman el denominado Acuerdo Por La Paz el cual significó desarrollar un plebiscito de entrada que consultaba sobre la aprobación o rechazo de una nueva constitución, que reemplazará a la elaborada durante la dictadura. El 25 de octubre del 2020 se aprueba, con un 78.28%, la elaboración de una nueva constitución para el país por medio de una Convención Constitucional. De esta forma, por primera vez en la historia constitucional y política se elabora una constitución de forma democrática, paritaria y con la inclusión de los pueblos originarios. Luego de más de un año de trabajo la propuesta elaborada por este organismo fue llevada a votación el 4 de septiembre del año 2022 y fue rechazada con un 61,89%. El texto constitucional propuesto para votación incluía el Estado ecológico y plurinacional, el reconocimiento de los pueblos originarios, el derecho humano al agua, a la educación, paridad, diversidad, no discriminación y vida libre de violencia, además de cambios en la organización política-administrativa del país que permitía una mayor descentralización espacial, instalando un nuevo paradigma en aspectos geográficos. Este proceso ha llevado a una profunda reflexión desde diferentes sectores para comprender los resultados obtenidos en el plebiscito de salida. En este sentido, desde un punto de vista geográfico, se realizará un análisis espacio-temporal sobre el concepto de crisis social vivido en Chile. Para ello, plantearemos tres ideas principales, una primera referida a responder la interrogante ¿se ha superado la crisis política en Chile?, una segunda que buscará tender relaciones con la teoría social y la geografía socio-crítica latinoamericana y, una tercera, que tiene como objetivo vincular esta ideas con el contexto político-económico en la región, poniendo atención en el enfoque de la filosofía política aplicada, en relación con los cambios normativos-éticos que se han planteado en Chile y en otros países de América. La hipótesis central es que la crisis socioespacial del país se ha dado desde un punto de vista ético-normativo producto de la instalación de una subjetividad y materialidad en el periodo neoliberal. Para trabajar esta idea, se presentarán tres dimensiones de análisis desde la filosofía política: la representación, la distribución y el reconocimiento. Con estas tres ideas, relacionaremos la teoría política del espacio geográfico con el proceso histórico de larga duración que nos permita desarrollar una mirada multiescalar. Se espera plantear un marco de estudio y de abordaje político para que, desde las ciencias, y la geografía en particular, podamos aportar en el debate y en el necesario diálogo de saberes (científico, popular-cotidiano y educativo) que permita aportar en las luchas por una mayor justicia social y territorial en Chile y América Latina.

Palabras clave: Estallido Social, multiescalaridad, proceso constituyente y geopolítica reciente de Chile.

In Oaxaca City, Mexico, garbage often seems to reach a point of crisis. As garbage workers strike, protesting the municipality’s failure to pay wages or make good on pension promises, households burn their waste or throw it out to pile up in streets across the city. Yet such global South cities have also been positioned as the solution to solid waste, through international initiatives with names such as Plastic Smart Cities and Zero Plastic Waste Cities. This paper investigates such “zero waste” and related solid waste reduction initiatives being pursued in urban Mexico. We use a political ecology lens to ask how the burden of responsibility for solid waste is distributed, discursively and consider how this framing influences proposed solutions. We also examine the material efforts and outcomes of a variety of initiatives to reduce waste at an urban scale in Oaxaca City. Through ethnographic research, we explore both the possibilities and limitations of solutions that focus on the urban agency of global South cities given a fossil fuel industry that continuously increases plastic production.
Keywords: urban political ecology, postcolonial urbanism, zero waste, sustainable cities

Within the framework of the international comparative multisite research project “Urbanization, Gender and the Global South. A transformative knowledge network,” our team in the Ramallah chapter approached the project’s questions on the causes behind the feminization of urban poverty and challenges to women’s right to the city from the domain of habituation of crises and the lacking disaster preparedness. The goal of the ethnographic research and research by design activities that we conducted was to mobilize knowledge and opinions to create informative materials in formats that are comprehensible to the general public, with the mission to support larger efforts seeking to pressure decision makers and shift paradigms towards a reality that is more secure as opposed to today’s abject vulnerability.

Palestine is a geography where crisis is not an event but continuous and compounded, it is political, economic, social, ecological, and therefore it has very tangible and visible spatial materializations. We focused on Ein Qiniya, a liminal village and at the same time a neighborhood within the administrative borders of Ramallah. About a third of its houses and cultivated fields lie within the recently expanded Master Plan of the highly contested and speculative-developments-driven city. At the same time, in the 1970s about half of its lands were confiscated by the Israeli regime that established the Dolev colony with watchtowers peeking through the windows of Ein Qiniyans.

Ein Qiniya’s picturesque landscape of agricultural terraces and fields line the paths of two important Wadis (water ways, valleys) that in winter fill up with rapid streams that feed from the mountainous slopes of Ramallah, while its houses rest in the middle atop a hill. According to the new regional plan of the Palestinian Authority, the upstream stretches of these waterways are to become the Ring Road and works in some sections have been completed, in disregard to the fragile ecosystem and the climate change related intensification of water cycles, as well as to the livelihoods of the many Ein Qiniya families that cultivate the area. A water treatment plant that was recently established upstream is already contaminating the northern arm, Wadi alDilb, and another plant is under construction in Wadi alOqdeh, the southern arm. Atop the socio-political crisis that rendered the lives of Ein Qiniyans precarious, now they are facing an ecological crisis and a new kind of economic crisis as a result of the intensifying speculation around the lands they live on but do not own – as the majority are descendants of refugees.

While there is considerable research on how urban marginality is systemically and socially reproduced, there is less exploration of how it is spatially reproduced. In light of recent wars and advancements in technologies of destruction, some urban scholars have been investigating concepts such as ‘urbicide’ (Graham 2006) and ‘spacio-cide’ (Hanafi 2009). Such studies tend to focus on aspects of spatial annihilation, its impact on economies and the subjugation of urban morphologies to the logics of surveillance and policing (e.g. Graham 2006), and the way spatial perception impacts narratives of identities and accentuation of traumas (e.g. Abourahme 2011). In Ramallah, there is little investigation of how neoliberalism – which plays out as new colonial capitalism – is spatializing its domination through the urban, causing socio-cide (Hilal and El Sakka 2015); where residents are socially disconnected, contestation increased, and opportunities to challenge the status quo of compounded crises are hindered.

Building on feminist critiques of capitalist social formation, this presentation will share the key findings of our research and the nuanced mappings that explored how the reality of compound crises and systemic spacio-cide affect the everyday lives of people in Ramallah. We will discuss the features of urban spaces that incubate regressive patterns of social reproduction, spatially engender discrimination, marginality, othering, and inhibit the formation of collective resistance and more just ecosystems. We will share the imagined alternative master plans and site-designs that were produced by 20 women interlocutors from Ein Qiniya ahead of the forthcoming official proposals for the development of their neighborhood, and a 3-minute advocacy short film.

Keywords: neighbourhood, pandemic management, collective and community care

References:
Abourahme, N. (2011). Spatial collisions and discordant temporalities: Everyday life between camp and checkpoint. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (2): 453–461.
Graham, S. ed. (2006). Cities, War, and Terrorism, Towards an Urban Geopolitics. Third Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Hanafi, S. (2009). Spacio-cide as a colonial politics in Palestinian Territory. Grotius International, Géopolitiques de l’Humanitaire (30 September). www.grotius.fr/spacio-cide-as-a-colonial-politics-in-palestinian-territory (accessed 2 February 2014).
Hilal, J. and El-Sakka, A. (2015). A Reading on the Socio Urban Changes in Ramalah and Kufur Aqab. The Center for Development Studies. Birzeit University, Birzeit.

In times of overlapping and interwoven crises, including neoliberalism, racism, austerity, transhostility, climate emergency and more, activist groups in the Global North are recognising the potential in (or even necessity of) joining forces across focus topics. Thinking crisis and violence intersectionally and organising struggles accordingly might be one strategy to fight rising (extreme) right politics with their narratives and budgeting practices that pit different marginalised groups against each other (Bilge 2013, p.407). Applying collaborative ethnographic methods, my research investigates how theories and understandings of intersectionality ‘travel’ to (Said 1994) and are put into practice as politics and tools in antiracist activist spaces in a Flemish city (Belgium) amidst crises.

The omnipresent sense of crisis brings with it feelings of urgency and negative affective reactions to disagreement, differing perspectives and lack of knowledge. Immediate actions seem to be required, which limits the time and space that can be allocated to mutual learning, caring negotiations and slow processes of building thorough, nuanced relationships. Pain and anger caused by everyday (and) traumatic experiences of oppression are paired with feelings of desperation, having to continuously keep fighting the same fights without any perceivable positive change. In spaces dominated by these intensities, coalition building, though desired, is complicated: Before the backdrop of de-politicised, empty references to intersectionality and in a context that routinely denies structural, institutional and everyday racism (Boulila 2019), questions of prioritisation and hierarchies among different intersecting forms of oppression arise. In the face of crises, critique of a potential partner’s limited knowledge and commitment seems to slide into violent exclusions, silencing, paralysis and an inability to work together. As bell hooks argues, “(r)adical commitment to political struggle carries with it the willingness to accept responsibility for using conflict constructively” (1986, p.125). Contrary to its constructive, educational intentions, however, pointing out harmful statements, assumptions and practices often takes the shape of harsh critique triggering guilt, shame or defensive reactions (Thom 2019).

The city government and institutions play their own role in further escalating a sense of crisis and worsening the challenges faced by those who seek to form coalitions and join forces. Restricted and selective budgeting politics and differential treatment based on activist topic, focus and approach, sets groups and organisations against each other. While for some, a positioning as an institution’s adviser or involvement in a performative city-funded campaign might be a strategic choice aimed at small changes from within, this seeming closeness to and cooperation with power can sow distrust and make them impossible partners in the eyes of others.

Rather than explicit educating and advocating for a recognition of the interconnectedness of different forms of oppression, opening up possibilities for intersectional activism and justice in the Flemish urban context seems to require more implicit and long-term forms of resistance, built on deep individual relationships, mutual trust and care (compare Aouragh 2019, p.17). How is this possible when a sense of interwoven crises dominates the atmosphere in the city and its activist spaces? In my contribution to this themed session, I want to shed light on activist practices resulting from understandings of intersectionality in the concrete geographical, historical and social context of the Flemish urban (antiracist) activist landscape, impacted by crises, urgency and negative affects.

Key words: intersectionality, activism, crisis, coalition building, affect

There can be no climate justice as long as “disaster preparedness” is sutured to carceral state and racial capitalist devaluations of people and places. In this paper, I will detail how the case of New Orleans reveals how the everyday and extraordinary crises of climate catastrophe are indexed and exacerbated by the racial regimes (Robinson 2007) of neoliberal urbanism. Against popular notions that the vulnerability of New Orleans and other places precarious to sea-level rise and heightened tropical storms are an example of state failure, I argue that emergency disaster responses have been produced through the material and ideological extension of racial criminalization since the 1970s. I contend that the material infrastructures of carceral power are dialectically legitimated and produced through the ideological infrastructures of criminalization – the racial logics that deem certain people and places as dangerous and/or deviant and thus needing to be managed through containment, displacement, and premature death. Which is to say, the uneven development of hurricane preparations and responses in South Louisiana clarifies how punitive power is mobilized as the neoliberal racial state’s primary climate crisis management strategy.

Understanding how the intertwining of the multi-scalar carceral infrastructures of military, policing, and jailing power is deployed in New Orleans as climate infrastructure is vital for abolitionist and climate justice movements. Attending to how disaster plans in the Gulf South and beyond pivot on carceral infrastructures compels us to consider how a just transition framework (Movement Generation n.d.) must necessarily work to abolish the carceral state if we hope to reverse the intensified racial premature death and organized abandonment (Harvey 1982; Gilmore 2008) confronting frontline climate communities.

Taking up these questions and themes, this paper will proceed in three parts. In the first part of the paper, I will outline how federal, state, and municipal governments all turned to law and order as their primary disaster response to Hurricane Katrina survivors. I demonstrate how such carceral emergency disaster responses were not invented in the moment but have been threaded through Louisiana’s disaster governance plans since the 1970s, intensified following the post-9/11 movement of Federal Emergency Management Agency into the Department of Homeland Security, and broadly reinforced by neoliberal state restructurings shaped by racial logics of disposability, dispossession, and extraction. In the second part of my paper, I will sketch out the shifts and continuities in everyday and extraordinary state responses to climate change in the years since Hurricane Katrina. While grassroots abolitionist activists have been significant gains, city leaders continue to adhere to narrow anti-Black conceptions of safety and security. The routinized climate disasters of boil water advisories, pump failures, and street flooding and the unprecedented mass failure of electrical grids in the wake of Hurricane Ida have gone hand in hand with city leaders’ prioritization of policing as the the only legitimate response to various crises. To close, I will consider what kinds of abolitionist infrastructures - material and ideological - does urban climate justice demand? What kinds of political structures, state and non-state, are necessary for grappling with the crises of climate change that go above the inherent limits of mutual aid?

Keywords: carceral geographies, disaster politics, climate crisis, abolitionist infrastructures, neoliberal urbanism


References

Gilmore, R.W. 2008. Forgotten places and the seeds of grassroots planning. In Engaging
contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship, ed. C. Hale, 31-61. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Harvey, David. 1982. The Limits to Capital. University of Chicago Press.

Movement Generation. n.d. From banks and tanks to cooperation and caring: A strategic framework for a just transition https://movementgeneration.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/JT_booklet_English_SPREADs_web.pdf

Robinson, C.J., 2007. Forgeries of memory and meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II. Univ of North Carolina Press.