Evento

Access to an adequate, timely, and reliable supply of good-quality water is fundamental to the survival and well-being of human beings. However, a large part of the global population, including the population of megacities of the world, is denied access to water. Conflict over water access has
been a historical phenomenon in Mumbai, one of the global megacities in India. Such conflict still persists in the city, especially over the denial of access to the formal water supply network to residents of informal habitations, even though the city has an abundant water supply and adequate
financial resources. This paper takes a look at the urban borderlands in the city of Mumbai—the geographically marginalized and ecologically precarious informal habitations occupied by the recent migrants to the city who are politically disenfranchised, economically immiserated, and socially othered – through the lens of their access to a public service like water. It talks about the tensions created by a serious fracture created by the purposeful though the unwarranted practice of denial of water services, the basic survival for human life. It traces in detail the long history of more than half a century of producing, resisting, and reproducing these fractures in the form of water deprivation. The paper starts with detailing the history of this persisting water access conflict in Mumbai. It starts with an analysis of the politics around a policy instrument called the cut-off date policy instituted in the early 1970s that created a category of ‘illegal’ citizens who could be denied water because of
their ‘illegal’ housing. Residents of such illegal housing then had to resort to subversive means of accessing water for their survival, such as tapping municipal water lines and drawing water illegally. This was repeatedly responded to by the state authorities by removing these illegal connections but
continuing to deny water services to these migrant citizens. In 2010, tensions reached a zenith when the middle-class sections of the city facing water scarcity due to low rainfall started calling these migrants criminals, water stealers, and encroachers. This led to the demands for strict legal action against them. The state authority responded by unleashing draconian legal provisions, police raids, and incarceration of these citizens trying to get water. In this background, a social justice movement called Pani Haq Samiti (Right to Water Committee – PHS) emerged from the various intersectional, marginalized, and migrant communities in the city. PHS responded with a court case demanding their human right to water, which was upheld by the High Court located in Mumbai city. In response to the court order, the city administration designed a new policy, which raised multiple and steep legal, procedural, technical, and financial barriers today first by migrant citizens to access water. In investigating this conflict, the research presented in this paper adopts the methodological approach that involves eliciting, re-articulating, and analyzing narratives around the issue of water access in Mumbai voiced by key actors who influence the city’s water-access policies. Narratives, here, are normative accounts of the viewpoints of actors on a contested issue. Such narratives comprise articulation of the positions of these actors on the issue as well as justification for these positions, along with criticisms of competing narratives. The paper argues that the grassroots struggle and the counter actions by the state and municipal authorities are both taking place simultaneously on two different planes. The first is the plane of narratives representing the symbolic and imaginative dimension of the conflict, where we observe a persisting clash among contending narratives that various actors-groups are continuously evolving, updating, and reinventing. The second is the plane of practice, where the concrete, practical strategies of diverse actors play out. On this plane, we observe actor groups deploying diverse practical strategies, such as enacting exclusionary policies, judicial interventions, and protests. The paper details how fractures in the form of acute water deprivation are produced and reproduced by state authorities through policies and narratives, which leads to different forms and levels of water deprivation based on social, religious, caste, class, and gender differences. The policies of the state and municipal administration release the different kinds of physical, technical as well as financial, and procedural barriers. These are supplemented with symbolic narratives that carry similarly diverse themes such as technical, economic, legal, and financial. These then are overcome by PHS through an equally diverse array of means, including micro-mobilization, public interest litigation, subversive actions, and even training of community-based para-technical to claim and capture the policy procedures from corrupt officials and their intermediaries. The paper intends to showcase that to disentangle this conflict with diverse dimensions and narratives around equally diverse themes, we require an interdisciplinary approach straddling not only different social sciences but also law, planning, and engineering knowledge. Keywords: urban water, narratives, resource conflicts, urban politics.

Keywords: in-between inhabitation; permanent temporariness; urban migration / For a long time, the urban studies debate on migration processes has developed through binary definitions such as formal/informal, local/outsider, ‘host’ communities/‘incoming’ migrants, inclusion/exclusion, norm/exception, emergency/ordinariness. The polarized understanding of permanence and temporariness emerges as one of these binaries: permanence often being regarded as the condition to aspire to and temporariness as a provisional or exceptional situation. In the last decades, the widespread presence of populations ‘on the move’, in transit, and displaced has prompted researchers to overcome the conceptualization of migration as a process leading to long-term settlement and integration. Hence, urban studies have devoted increasing attention to the more nuanced spatialities and temporalities that characterize migration, settlement, and inhabitation processes, as the introduction of concepts such as “provisional permanence” and “protracted temporariness” testifies. Amidst intensifying global flows of people, capital and goods, and the contextual evolution of borders into an apparatus for filtering and control, cross-border circulations of people intersect with broader urban dynamics of displacement, bordering, and exclusion. A wider range of populations experience in-between conditions of inhabiting the city, whereby provisional socio-spatial arrangements and unsettled inhabitation emerge as both an effect of, and a strategic response to, such dynamics (Fawaz, 2016). Concepts emerging from different geographies, from ‘grayspacing’ (Yiftachel, 2009) to ‘dwelling in liminalities’ (Lancione and Simone, 2021) contribute to outline cities as contested borderscapes of ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2012) hosting a ‘deeply stratified urban citizenry’ (Gawlewicz & Yiftachel, 2022). Precarity is increasingly normalized, transiency often slips into an open-ended standstill, and social inclusion gets both tenuous and conditional. The discussion on these in-between conditions, although very rich and rapidly expanding, is still fragmented and often largely defined through a traditional understanding of permanence prevailing over temporariness. As Latham (2014) underlines, we still need to ‘liberate temporariness’ from its understanding as a deferred permanence. In this sense, we refer to in-between inhabitation to capture the heterogeneous and contested process of dwelling and city-making that unfolds through the practices of unsettled populations – including various profiles of ‘migrants’ and ‘local’ residents – who navigate the time and space between permanence and temporariness. While generally unfolding in everyday life, mostly under the radar of official policy-making and beyond the realm of institutionalized planning, in-between inhabitation contributes substantially to the continuous remake of the city, its relations, affordances, and spaces. This contribution argues that there is a need to explicitly set the focus on in-between inhabitation. We aim at systematizing existing standpoints and discussing future perspectives through a review of interdisciplinary literature across migration and urban studies. We ground our argument in three snapshots from recent fieldwork for our research and work practice: sites that we may define as “urban borderlands”, as diverse as an occupied building in Johannesburg’s fast-changing inner-city, a help-desk in a run-down historical neighbourhood in Palermo turned into a Mediterranean migration crossorads, and an informal waste collection centre in a former gecekondu area that is undergoing a botched urban transformation project in Istanbul. Across these three very different contexts, we can observe how residents with varying origin, background, and legal status dwell through forms of transitoriness, marginalization, and instability. This in-between inhabitation carries significant implications and challenges for urban planning and politics: with our contribution, we aim to discuss the theme through the three interrelated dimensions of planning theory, spatial arrangements, and citizenship practices. / REFERENCES: Fawaz, M. (2016) “Planning and the refugee crisis: Informality as a framework of analysis and reflection,” Planning Theory, 16(1): 99–115. Gawlewicz, A. and Yiftachel, O. (2022) “‘Throwntogetherness’ in hostile environments. Migration and the remaking of urban citizenship”, City, (26)2-3: 346-358. Huq, E. and Miraftab, F. (2020) ““We are All Refugees”: Camps and Informal Settlements as Converging Spaces of Global Displacements”, Planning Theory & Practice, (21)3: 351-370. Lancione, M. and Simone, A. (2021) “Dwelling in liminalities, thinking beyond inhabitation”, Environment and Planning D Society and Space.
Latham, R. (2014) “Temporal orders, re-collective justice, and the making of untimely states,” in Vosko, L.F., Preston, V., and Latham, R. (eds.) Liberating Temporariness?: Migration, work, and citizenship in an age of insecurity, 272–295. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s Univeristy Press. Mezzadra, S., and Neilson, B. (2012) Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press. Yiftachel, O. (2009) “Theoretical Notes On `Gray Cities’: the Coming of Urban Apartheid?”, Planning Theory, 8(1): 87–99.

Keywords: climate change, migration, critical mobilities, urban borderlands, Bangladesh / Abstract: This paper seeks to critically reconsider the vast ‘rural-to-urban’ migration literature in Bangladesh through the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ proposed by Mimi Sheller and the late John Urry back in 2006. While there is an overwhelmingly large body of scholarship focussing on internal migration issues in Bangladesh, much of it I argue is premised on a ‘sedentary metaphysics’, which presupposed a binary distinction between being static and being on the move. Thus, migration scholars will conceive of movement as primarily linear, discrete and from one bounded location to another. Mobility studies then offers scholars the ability to think through ‘movement’ as a more fluid aspect of everyday life, blurring the distinction between migrating and being sedentary. This research draws on extensive field research I helped conduct for the Migrants on the Margins project in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 2016 to 2018. Led by the University of Sussex, the purpose of this project was to understand how ‘migrants’ to the city living in informal settlements interacted with the rest of the city. The project utilized numerous innovative research method, including collecting fifty oral migration histories; using the hiking app, Ramblr, to map twenty-five people’s daily routines; and working with an organization called PositiveNegatives to help represent an interlocutor’s migration story in comic form. Drawing on these methods, I argue that thinking through mobilities rather than migration offers scholars new insights and connections when attempting to comprehend people’s movement dynamics in Bangladesh, particularly in the context of a plethora of ‘crises’, including but not limited to the climate crisis, industrialization and global capitalism. Such focus allows us to see the connection between macro-level processes and the daily lives of those who have been forced or ‘encouraged’ to move to Dhaka to not only fuel the labour needs of the garments sector, the largest industry in the country, but to also meet the domestic service needs of wealthier residents of the city. Utilizing the concept of an urban borderland, not as a national frontier, but as a space of friction and heightened tension between the have-nots and the haves of the city, I demonstrate how binary understandings of formal and informal housing, as well as urban citizen and migrant, even within a single country such as Bangladesh, are not only contradictory but often entangled in complex ways. While ‘climate migrants’ are often perceived as a racialized threat to the stability of the Global North, this paper draws on ethnographic encounters in the informal settlements of Dhaka to reveal the actual de-stabilization occurring in urban spaces in the Global South that are both caused by the climate crisis and yet continue to sustain capitalism in subtle albeit sinister ways. I end with several reflections of how a mobilities perspectives not only brings scholars new insights and perspectives on urban processes and borderlands in Dhaka, but why land tenure movement in Bangladesh cannot only fight for the rights of landless peasants situated in rural regions but also must fight for the rights of migrants who have found themselves living in urban informal settlements due to climate change and other capitalist-related crises.

The Canadian settler-imaginary that has long denied cities and urban environments as Indigenous places (Barman, 2007; Tomiak, 2017). Despite this, Indigenous peoples in urban centers, such as the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, continue to contest this designation. The Indian Act, introduced in 1876 in Canada, saw major shifts to Indigenous policy which followed an agenda of assimilation and confinement, with the creation of the Indian reserve system, residential schools, and a “defacto denial of aboriginal title” (Harris, 2002, p.21, see also, McKee, 1996, Tennant, 2014). As a result, Indigenous people such as those in Manitoba were actively removed from places of significant social, cultural and political activities and relegated to the peripheries through settler-state power which worked to isolate Indigenous peoples from their traditional territories and confine them to Indigenous reserves often in very remote locations. However, Indigenous resurgence in Winnipeg is actively contesting the urban as settler space through the creation of Urban reserve, Naawi Oodena, Winnipeg, Manitoba, situated at the confluences of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers has been an ongoing site of Indigenous political/social and cultural significance. While this juncture, known as “the forks,” now hosts a Canadian National Historic Site in downtown Winnipeg, more importantly, for over 6000 years, it was a primary “meeting place” for the nations that comprise the Treaty One nations as well as other Indigenous groups in the region (The Forks. December 4, 2022.) Winnipeg, Manitoba has long been home to Canada’s largest Indigenous urban population with upwards of 100,000 according to the Statistics Canada website (Map 4, Dec 4, 2022). Moreover, the area known as the Forks, as well as all of the city of Winnipeg itself, rests on the traditional territories of the seven Treaty One nations, the Brokenhead, Long Plain, Peguis, Roseau River, Sagkeeng, Sandy Bay and Swan Lake First Nations. These nations have maintained a long relationship with the city of Winnipeg and their recent efforts have been to push for rightfully denied treaty lands through Treaty Land Entitlements and the creation of Urban Reserves. Urban Reserves in Canada are a strengthening force particularly in the prairie provinces such as Manitoba. The Manitoba Treaty Land Entitlements (TLE) Agreement was signed in May of 1997 between the Government of Canada, and the Province of Manitoba (Government of Canada. Treaty Land Entitlements in Manitoba, Dec 4, 2022). TLE Agreements reflect the reserve lands promised for use to each person of the Treaty One nations and that were not received upon signing their treaty with the Government in 1871, at Lower Fort Garry (30 minutes from downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba). Indigenous resurgence such as we see through the actions of the Treaty One nations to reclaim and reinfuse places where they have formerly faced removal and exclusion is a significant move that both deconstructs narratives of the urban as a settler space and rightfully asserts Indigenous presence into the urban landscape. The establishment of the urban reserve, Naawi Oodena, is one step in contesting settler authority over the urban. Through a study of the Naawi Oodena Masterplan (former Kapyong Barracks), I will bring into conversation concepts of Indigenous urbanism with a settler urbanism. I ask two questions in this essay. First, how has the Indigenous city of Winnipeg, Manitoba been constructed as a settler place? I will approach this question by interrogating how settler-colonialism has constructed and defined the concept of urbanism and how this is reflected in settler economies. Second, I will ask how does Indigenous urbanism contest definitions of settler urbanism in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and how might it contest settler economies and reinscribe Indigenous economies on the landscape? To anchor my analysis, I will specifically look at the establishment of the Naawi Oodena urban reserve (formerly Kapyong Barracks). Keywords: Urban Indigenous, Settler-colonialism, First Nations, Manitoba, Critical Discourse Analysis.

Keywords (3-5): border-form, logistics city, primitive accumulation, infrastructure, value / Abstract: In recent years, many have taken up the mapping of border violence with an eye towards the abolition of both physical borders and bordering processes. Understood as a material and epistemic process, bordering adjoins vast labor, commodity, migration and financial flows across an ever-thicker, more contradictory global space. Yet, representing the form of the border, with its constituent configurations of both ‘mute’ and direct compulsion, is a thorny task. In these analyses, a series of antinomies emerge: between violence and representation; impersonal and personal domination; dead and living labor; social reproduction and the reproduction of borders. Rather than resolution, these mediations instead open the aperture, even if only for a moment, to more wholly diagnose the place of the border in capital’s totality, wherein a question emerges: why do borders, and bordering processes, appear as they do in our present conjuncture? As a speculative answer, I pose the border as an inverted social form that takes on the appearance of a spatial, infrastructural, legal, political and economic reality, a social form that nonetheless can only be perceived through its ordinary, sensuous appearance in walls, surveillance equipment, logistics centers and juridical texts. In contradistinction to the orthodox presentation of the money-, value-, or commodity-form, which conceal the social character of private labor and the social relations between individual workers (Marx, 1976: 168), the border-form foregrounds its constitutive violence. Violence and separation, after all, are foundational to both capital and the border-form, each constituted by the suspension (aufgehoben) of primitive accumulation in the ongoing separation, and subsequent reconnection in fetishized form, of people from their means of social reproduction (Mau, 2023: 140). With the border-form, we can recognize the manner in which the law of value presupposes the force of value in the premise of its concept (Bonefeld, 2016: 90). It is in this contradictory unity, between the materiality of human life and its historically-determined social forms, that I hope to approach Laredo-Nuevo Laredo as an archetype of what photographer Allan Sekula referred to as the forgotten spaces of global capital. The city, located in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, is the largest inland port in North America and a key node in a freight network that facilitates the circulation of commodities, people and money throughout the continent. Today, over 30,000 Laredo residents work in Trade, Transportation, and Utilities and, like a number of other regions previously considered peripheral to the global economy, has positioned itself in competition with more traditional sites of industry and trade. It is now home to an extensive archipelago of highways, railways, warehouses, distribution centers and related industrial sites. Like California’s Inland Empire and the megaports of China’s Pearl River Delta, Laredo-Nuevo Laredo has sought to overcome the long global downturn by integrating its spatial resources, productive capacity, labor force and surplus capital into what could fittingly be called an emergent urban logistics frontier. Thinking with those who have tirelessly fought against the form of the capitalist state, its constituent value relations and its apparatus of carceral, police and border oppression, I aim to understand Laredo-Nuevo Laredo as a vital form of urban infrastructure through which the expanding spiral of capitalist accumulation, and therefore the logic of class struggle, unfolds. Rather than a mere instrument of the ruling class, or a materialization of its power, we can recognize a number of contradictory features in the border-form: it holds relative autonomy to both state and personifications of capital, yet is necessary for the reproduction of both; its persistence is reliant on a number of other contradictory forms including value, state and nation; and, counterintuitively, its extensive and intensive proliferation is necessary for the reproduction of the world market. We could add that the border-form expresses a system of control for those surplus populations tendentially produced by capital’s own self-destructive logic; determining how central it is to that logic will be an undercurrent of this study. My conceptual intentions are thus threefold. First, to reveal the logical and historical determinations of the border-form as a necessary form of appearance of capitalist social relations. Second, to articulate how a class composed through its dispossession takes the form of a racialized, gendered and nationalized group of ‘migrants’. And, third, to trouble the ontological distinction between the direct and indirect violence that constitutes ‘free’ labor. If, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2018) argues, capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it, then an abolitionist theory of the border must begin with these difference-making relations and proceed to articulate their concrete, contingent appearance in borderlands the world over. / References: Bonefeld, W. (2016). Critical theory and the critique of political economy: On subversion and negative reason. Bloomsbury. / Gilmore, R.W. (2018). “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” Tabula Rasa, n.28, pp.57-77. / Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy. Penguin Books in association with New Left Review. / Mau, S. M. (2023). Mute compulsion: A Marxist theory of the economic power of capital. Verso.

Key words: Afro-descendant migration – territorial stigmatization – nationality - race
The presentation addresses the question of how the categories of nationality and race are spatialized in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago in Chile, under the assumption that there is a common and shared idea of where those who migrate from the Latin American and Caribbean region live, particularly those of Afro-descendant, and that this idea is linked to growing processes of ethno-racial and territorial stigmatization, where public opinion has played a key role. The intention is to develop the analysis from three scales and three perspectives, starting with the participants under the logic that the arrival to a territory within the Metropolitan Region of Santiago does not imply in any case a first barrier or border of access, but that this is constituted in a way intertwined with other processes that highlight the migratory difference of the subjects and groups with the unequal and segregated structure of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile.
The presentation is based on a case study of five communes within the Metropolitan Region of Santiago de Chile and is structured in three sections, from the micro to the macro, starting with what the migrants interviewed said about their places of residence within the Metropolitan region, then on the meso scale, the municipal vision and the measures taken to manage the communal image of migratory destination and potential stigmas are reviewed. And, at the macro level, from what the media portrays, the emphasis on the categories of nationality and race to talk about the territories is observed. On this last scale, qualitative descriptive discourse analysis was used for texts.
By analyzing race and nationality in an intersectional manner together with other categories such as gender and class, it is suggested that the former -race and nationality- are emphasized in processes of territorial stigmatization that are perceived by those who migrate, known by local authorities and mediated by public discourses at the national level for the subjects, groups, and the territories they inhabit. It is from this multi-scale framework of difference and inequality that, on the one hand, some
territories become borders to the migratory experience and to the possibilities of socio-spatial mobility in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. And, on the other hand, they acquire a racialized character, that is, they are hierarchized in a position of inferiority (material and symbolic) by a racial attribute which is constituted as an explanation for the disadvantages they face, without considering the structural inequalities that have shaped the urban space of the Metropolitan Region of Santiago.
The presentation is part of the author's doctoral research in Urban Studies of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.